Nobody gets to the Mosquito Coast in the first season of The Mosquito Coast, Apple TV+’s very loose adaptation of Paul Theroux’s 1981 novel and Peter Weir’s 1986 film version starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. The actual Mosquito Coast is a region in Central America where quixotic inventor Allie Fox flees with his family in both Theroux’s novel and Weir’s film. This new TV-series version, starring and produced by author Theroux’s nephew Justin Theroux, reimagines Allie as a criminal on the run, although he’s still an inventor and still prone to conspiratorial rants about the state of the U.S.
The first episode of The Mosquito Coast opens with an elaborate CGI tracking shot along the interior of Allie’s greatest invention, a machine for making ice without modern refrigeration. “How do you make ice from fire?” Allie asks as the camera swoops through his device, and he treats the question with all the reverence of a religious text. But Allie’s obsession with his creations dissipates almost immediately in the face of more pressing dangers. While Ford’s Allie voluntarily took his family to Central America in search of a simpler life away from American greed and consumerism, Theroux’s Allie is more concerned with not getting arrested by government agents or killed by cartel assassins.
Creator Neil Cross (Luther) never specifies why exactly Allie and his wife Margot (Melissa George) are wanted by the government, although there are numerous frustrating moments throughout the seven-episode season in which characters come close to divulging that information, only to fall back on vague hand-waving. “How much trouble are you actually in?” asks sullen teenage daughter Dina (Logan Polish) in the second episode. “Enough,” is her dad’s only response. “Your dad never hurt anyone,” Margot tells Dina in a later episode, but still won’t specify what Allie did.
That kind of cryptic plot teasing is common to far too many prestige dramas, and The Mosquito Coast never makes it seem worthwhile for viewers to stick around to find out the answers. When government agents converge on the Fox family home in Stockton, California, Allie, Margot, Dina and younger son Charlie (Gabriel Bateman) leave in a hurry, and they spend the rest of the season alternately one step ahead of their pursuers and narrowly escaping from their clutches. Rather than the self-righteous crusader of the book and the movie, this Allie Fox is the descendant of TV antiheroes like Breaking Bad’s Walter White and Ozark’s Marty Byrde, a criminal who justifies his morally dubious actions by claiming that they’re all for the benefit of his family.
The Mosquito Coast owes so much to those two shows and to other, less successful prestige crime dramas that it’s replaced the unique perspective of Paul Theroux’s book with an overly familiar tone and style. There are the dogged federal agents played by Kimberly Elise and James LeGros. There’s a sinister female crime lord who dresses impeccably and carries an elegant cane. There’s a sharp-tongued, world-weary assassin played by Ian Hart in one of his signature hats. There are lots of moral dilemmas that are portrayed as complex but really just involve Allie acting selfishly.
If the plotting and the characters in The Mosquito Coast were more compelling, it wouldn’t matter as much that Cross has ignored virtually every element of his source material. But once the Foxes start running, The Mosquito Coast is full of recycled elements that it fails to approach with a new angle. Because the creators are so insistent on keeping Allie’s background and alleged crimes a secret, it’s tough to understand his motivations. Ford’s Allie was deluded and borderline abusive to his family, but at least he was a distinctive character. This Allie makes allusions to working with the NSA and environmental activist groups, but speaks mostly in genre clichés.
At least George gets more to do here as Margot than Mirren did in the movie. Margot is an active participant in Allie’s plans, sometimes supporting them and sometimes attempting to thwart them. She gets more of a concrete background, including a wealthy upbringing and parents who still beg her to come home, and George gives her an internal strength that’s more measured than Theroux’s manic intensity as Allie. The kids are the most conflicted, but they seem to randomly change perspectives on what Allie calls “an adventure” from episode to episode and even scene to scene.
The episodes are mostly shapeless and repetitive, as the Foxes frequently end up trapped or captured and then miraculously escape, only to do it all over again. Allie’s supposed brilliance as an inventor is almost immediately dropped, but he’s an all-purpose tactical wizard, using a soda can to open handcuffs, breaking out of jail via a storm drain, and rewiring a desert emergency beacon to transmit a cell signal, among other unlikely feats.
Allie is so crafty that there’s not much tension to all the supposed danger the family is in, and the season ends with them not really any worse off than when it began. If there are devoted fans of the book or movie watching, they won’t find anything recognizable left by that point. The majority of viewers who aren’t familiar with the source material will just find a mediocre crime drama with an inexplicable title.
Starring Justin Theroux, Melissa George, Logan Polish and Gabriel Bateman, the first two episodes of The Mosquito Coast premiere April 30 on Apple TV+, with subsequent episodes premiering each Friday.