‘I Will Find You’ Review: Netflix’s Latest Harlan Coben Thriller Is So Bad It’s Almost Good

“I Will Find You” is the most ludicrous show of the year so far, starting with a simple premise and then piling on impossibilities at such a dizzying rate, you can’t help but admire the courage required to convey them all with a straight face. While not a good show by any stretch of the imagination — and there are many stretches to be made here — the Netflix series does manage to conjure so-bad-its-good bemusement.

It’s not slop, if only because slop lacks this level of batshit ingenuity. It’s also not worthy of its talented cast, including Britt Lower, Logan Browning, and Jonathan Tucker. (The latter two, it must be said, really put in the work to earn an investment by the audience the story doesn’t merit.) And it’s probably not worth your time, unless a bleak-but-brainless Boston-based thriller is what you will find this weekend, so help you Gawd.

Which, as an avid fan of “The Town” (and “The Town” super-fan Joe Mazzulla), I can understand. The eight-hour limited series — based on yet another pulp mystery novel by Harlan Coben, this one from 2023 — focuses on a guy named David (Sam Worthington), your usual husband and father who’s been wrongly convicted of a very unusual atrocity. Not only is David serving a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit, but said crime is the murder of his only son, Matthew, and that murder was carried out by beating the little boy to death with a baseball bat.

How, you may be wondering, does David not know whether he committed such a horrific act? Well, he doesn’t remember, because — as actual attorneys purportedly argued in a legitimate court of law — he was in the midst of a “night terror” when he walked into his son’s room and clubbed him enough times to render visual identification infeasible. But hey, that’s what DNA tests are for, and the DNA tests say the little dead boy was Matthew.

…or did they? Five years into his life sentence (because, again, no one batted an eye when told a grown man bludgeoned his own child to death during a “night terror”), David is visited by his former sister-in-law Rachel (Britt Lower), who’s there to show David a picture she noticed online with a little boy in the background — a little boy who looks a lot like Matthew, including a telling birthmark on his right cheek. Could it be… but how would he… and why would anyone…?

Before you can say “coincidence,” “bad prank,” or “photoshop,” David is all in, and for a guy who everyone thinks killed his own son, he’s got plenty of helpers. His dad’s old cop buddy (Peter Outerbridge) just happens to be David’s prison warden. (He pulled some strings, OK?!) His best friend (Tucker) is a cop in the Boston police department (and he’s one of the good ones, OK?!). Rachel’s ex-boyfriend (Milo Ventimiglia) is so head-over-heels in love with her that he’s willing to lose the family fortune if it means helping her find the truth… about… her ex-brother-in-law… the child killer?

Logan Browning in ‘I Will Find You’Courtesy of Amanda Matlovich / Netflix

I mean, OK. Love makes us do crazy things, but his is quite the gesture considering Rachel’s own loyalty is already implausibly unyielding. Even when the disgraced former journalist gets a shot at redemption via a story as good as, say, a dad escaping prison to find the son he was accused of killing, it’s clear that’s not what’s driving Rachel. She’s not in it for herself. She just believes Matthew is alive.

And you will too, most likely before “I Will Find You” confirms Matthew’s existence within the first few episodes. For all its twists, where the series is headed is never in doubt. Showrunner Robert Hull (the O.G. “Gossip Girl,” “Gotham”) crafts an inviting thriller with a soft heart and softer brain, luring viewers to lean in and hear the messy secrets, under the pretense nothing truly unpleasant is going to happen. Sure, one of your favorite actors is going to turn out to be a Bad Man™️, and yeah, there’s a lot of weepy talk about dead kids. But there’s also plots involving the Boston mob, corrupt cops, sketchy fertility clinics, and — I kid you not — a faked bus accident. So if you’re dwelling on a dead kid who’s not actually dead after all that, get some therapy, my guy.

Far harder to ignore is the missed sitcom opportunity presented by FBI partners Max Williams (Chi McBride) and Sarah Greer (Browning) — whose bizarre chemistry is a credit to both actors leaning into a critical, fanciful twist — as well as the blunt exposition uttered by every single character in every single scene of every single episode. “I Will Find You” is the kind of show that has fathers repeat the phrase “he’s my son” as clarification and conviction, but never at the same time. Dad will say, “He’s my son” to confirm that this other character is, indeed, his son, and then he’ll turn around and say, “He’s my son” to explain why he’s risking it all to protect him. (Consider that fair warning for Worthington’s climactic line delivery and final line of the series.)

“I Will Find You” follows in the tawdry tradition of so many other Coben-inspired thrillers, which Netflix and Amazon have been pumping out to the pace of 14 series in eight years. Their steady output speaks to their popularity far more than their footprint — a tragically common trend in modern Hollywood, where being a viewer’s second screen is often the studio’s first priority. The latest edition may be glossed up with star power, but there’s no resonance. Sometimes that’s OK, so long as you don’t hope to find anything more.

Grade: C-

“I Will Find You” premieres Thursday, June 18 on Netflix. All eight episodes will be released at once.