One sometimes finds oneself wondering whether Harlan Coben is an author or a set of AI procedures designed to manufacture plots of ludicrous twistiness. Whatever he or it is, it’s managed to infatuate Netflix and Prime Video, who can’t stop turning this stuff into TV wallpaper (The Stranger, The Woods, Shelter etc). Richard Armitage quite often stars in them.
Armitage isn’t in I Will Find You, but most of the usual Coben-esque traits are in evidence. There are frequent enigmatic flashbacks to past events which have paved the way for the present-day action, there are missing persons and altered names, concealed identities, and deus-ex-machina revelations that suddenly set the story racing off in unexpected directions. Plausible? Of course not. Yet here we are, watching it.
At the core of the action is David Burroughs (a world-weary Sam Worthington), a man jailed for life after being found guilty of battering his three-year-old son Matthew to death with a baseball bat. However, the fact that the child had been beaten so savagely that he was unrecognisable might cause the odd alarm bell to ring, even if DNA evidence proved his identity. Burroughs himself has continually protested his innocence, despite a witness who claims to have seen him burying a bloodied bat.
The worm begins to turn when his ex-wife’s sister, Rachel (Britt Lower), visits David and shows him a recent photograph of a young boy who closely resembles the deceased Matthew, right down to an identical birthmark on his cheek. David is thunderstruck – could his son somehow be alive? What’s a poor jailbird to do, except bust out of prison and embark on an epic journey of discovery and redemption – especially when there’s a conspiracy inside the prison to have him murdered.
The story rattles along, swerving through all manner of hazards and obstacles rapidly enough to stop you thinking about them too deeply. Rachel is an out-of-work investigative journalist keen to restart her career, so the story of a sensational miscarriage of justice holds a particular allure for her (and to her former editor at the Boston Globe). She taps up her old lover, Hayden Payne (Milo Ventimiglia), for assistance. He’s the wealthy son of the even wealthier Gertrude Payne (a very fatale-ish Madeleine Stowe giving it some Cruella de Vil), a society heiress fabled for philanthropical good works (pictured above, Stowe and Ventimiglia). However, steely Gertrude has fingers in many pies on several continents, including interests in orphanages and reproductive fertility clinics. It would be naive to assume that her motivations were entirely honourable.
To be fair, the key to the mystery is kept cunningly concealed until the great reveal is finally unleashed. Meanwhile, the theme of parents and children keeps echoing through the narrative. David has a bumpy relationship with his own father Lenny (Hugh Thompson), a broken-down ex-cop, while a conflagration between Hayden and Gertrude was inevitable. For a bit of light relief we also have a father-daughter pair of police officers, Sarah Greer (Logan Browning) and Max Williams (Chi McBride), who lob a bit of comedy banter into the mix. That’s entertainment!
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