Once a generation, Hollywood produces a leading man whose face and eyes tell very different stories. Jake Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Irons, even Jimmy Stewart: Each wears beneath his movie star looks a bone-deep suggestion of depravity and decay. Two weeks ago, I would have said that Gen Y’s representative on the list was Robert Pattinson, the vampiric star of Twilight and The Batman. I now know better. English comedian Jack Whitehall, at a glance the world’s handsomest man, has knocked Pattinson aside with all the grace of an out-of-control lorry. With apologies to Whitehall’s mother, romantic partner, and friends, the 37-year-old is clearly evil.
The tension between charisma and villainy is at the heart of Malice, Amazon’s six-episode saga of fanatical revenge. Whitehall’s character, Adam Healey, is a charming “manny” equally at ease quoting Shakespeare and whipping up brunch. He is also — how to put this? — a murderous degenerate set on ruining the lives of the Tanners, the jet-setting family for whom he works. The source of Adam’s hostility, kept hidden until the series finale, is interesting but beside the point. For most of the show’s run, the young man is simply Nemesis in the flesh, a being of such mythological fury that even to discuss his motives feels like an affront.
That viewers, too, are meant to hate the Tanners is a fact that does much to establish Malice’s tone. Played by David Duchovny, husband Jamie is the smirking embodiment of high finance, a heartless money man who lacks, by his own admission, any “tact, composure, or empathy.” Wife Nat (Carice van Houten), a Dutch-Parisian fashion designer living in London, is the kind of person whom right-populists call to mind when trying to defund NATO. Throw in three spoiled moppets, mostly forgettable, and one may find oneself standing too close to Malice’s blaring alarm. Narcissistic, ungrateful, and deeply sad, the Tanners are the ne plus ultra of petulant privilege. Just as significantly, however, they are an absurd and mean-spirited caricature of the upper crust.
It is perhaps surprising, given these depictions, that Malice struggles to decide between killing its targets and moving into their spare bedrooms. This is never truer than in the series’s early episodes, set and filmed on the Greek island of Paros in the Cyclades. There, amid blue-domed splendor, Jamie and family splash in an infinity pool between day-trips to a sanctuary of Apollo. “Thought I’d see how the other half live,” Adam says when caught snooping around the villa. Never mind that he doesn’t really mean it. The camera, less interested in politics than in visual sumptuousness, largely does.
To put it another way, Malice is as thematically incoherent as most eat-the-rich programming. For every Stalinist harumph, we get at least a dozen wistful glances at the Tanners’ high-end décor. Not helping matters is the fact that Adam is obviously insane. A mere annoyance in the show’s early going, our grinning antihero soon graduates to scandal-mongering, grand larceny, and the slaughtering of man and beast. By the production’s conclusion, he is pure psychopathic rage, a creature whom only a sadomasochist could willingly embrace.
Moreover, and to the show’s real detriment, Adam is unexplainably weird. Why should a man set on vengeance waste time going to sex clubs? What’s with the fawning over a pet snake? It isn’t just that these plot points go nowhere; it’s that they feel like cheap signaling even as we observe them for the first time. One might normally praise a series that dramatized its characterizations so faithfully. Malice’s details, however, don’t add up. Is Adam a devil? A righteous scourge? A victim of abuse, himself? Even after finishing the last episode, most viewers won’t be sure.
This is not to say that Whitehall misplays his role. Indeed, the actor’s surprising dramatic chops are part of what makes Malice worth streaming despite its flaws. Pleasant but dead-eyed, plausible but eerily “off,” the Englishman is as terrifying as Jack the Ripper and as smooth as a Tory MP. It would be a stretch to call Whitehall’s performance likable, but “compelling” is not at all too far. Like the forebears mentioned above, he will never pull off simple wholesomeness, no matter how hard he tries. Cast correctly, though, he may enjoy a startlingly effective TV career.
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There is another reason, too, to forgive Malice’s many faults. Duchovny remains, at 65 years old, one of our most interesting performers, and Prime’s production is what he is currently on. Largely wasted through the series’s opening episodes, the former star of The X-Files and Californication emerges to dominate its second half, as Jamie experiences humanization through suffering. Note in particular a scene in which a baseless sexual-harassment allegation must be swatted aside. For an instant, we catch a glimpse of the old Fox Mulder: derided, ruined, but still the last sane man in the room.
It will not be saying too much to reveal that things end badly for the Tanners. The show’s opening scene, a misordered epilogue, discloses that and more. What we are watching, then, is not a mystery but a warning. In these modern times, connected as we all are, it is distressingly easy to destroy a life. That truth should give all of us pause.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.