If you have to be stuck on a meandering, seemingly endless trek with a family of four, you could do a lot worse than the quartet of actors cast as the Foxes.
There's enough twists, turns and tantalising teases to make an initial exploratory dip into the first instalment turn into an addictive all-night binge.
The most prescient thing this version of The Mosquito Coast has to say about capitalism is how quickly it morphs into a knockoff of Breaking Bad and Ozark, repackaging a primetime TV template to bring an old story to a new audience.
The first season feels like a prologue to the novel's richer, deeper environmental concerns about American colonialism. Still, Theroux is convincing and compelling as this delusional narcissist of an antihero.
The show's skittish unwillingness to look hard at its characters for longer than a monologue dooms it -- not to failure but to a sort of absence, making a show about people in the fight for their lives feel like something to have on in the background.
Fox's delusions grow to the point where it's sometimes hard to believe what's happening, and it makes less of a statement about consumerism and the dangers of a free market than it, as I said already, does the Walter White thing in a misfired manner
A lot of bleeding-heart sentiments are expressed in a show where a white family traverse the hostile, corpse-ridden landscape from the US to Mexico like tourists in other people's suffering.
Time after time, the Foxes seem utterly snookered only to be saved by a completely outrageous twist. Still, it's all handsomely shot, the action is tense and kinetic, and before long we're getting some confronting perspectives on the American Southwest.
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.
