HBO Max's The Tourist solidifies Jamie Dornan as a pretty good actor

The A.V. Club

"It takes a big person to admit that they were wrong, which makes it so hard for an actor to shift the established opinion of them within the culture and critical establishment," says Leila Latif. "It seems that HBO’s The Tourist may just do something truly Herculean, and make all the Jamie Dornan naysayers admit he’s actually a pretty good actor." The Tourist, Latif adds, "is buoyed by a distinctly adult tone—there’s a gameness to it that makes the scary, horny, and darkly comic elements work well in tandem. Each twist (and they’re deployed every 15 minutes or so) beyond the second episode lands with full weight, particularly in the final episode where Dornan’s acting chops reach their apex. It’s hard to imagine that The Tourist will have a seismic impact—the era of excellent television is a thankfully crowded one, and little here breaks new ground. But it’s an absolute hoot to travel down the series’ dusty Australian roads, taking in the trippy, almost Lynchian tangents through fractured minds and broken memories. Anti-hero narratives are familiar for a reason, and The Tourist keeps them as compelling as ever; even when it treads familiar territory, it’s never a bore. The paradigm of TV thrillers may not be shifted, but many people’s perceptions of Jamie Dornan will never be the same."

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• The Tourist is beautifully shot and well-paced that would've better with less streaming bloat: "A story like this should be told without an ounce of fat," says Daniel Fienberg. "Yet even with its occasional excesses, The Tourist is a mostly taut, pretension-lite mystery with a vivid setting, a few surprises and a great trio of lead performances from Jamie Dornan, Danielle Macdonald and Shalom Brune-Franklin." Fienberg adds: "Dornan is probably too hunky to be inherently ideal as the Hitchcockian Everyman, but The Man is a savvy encapsulation of Dornan’s varied skills, especially those he’s been showcasing in his projects from the past year-ish. He has compelling chemistry with both Macdonald and Brune-Franklin, he’s generally convincing as a sturdy action lead and he has an underlying menace that lets you wonder if the man that The Man used to be might not be so virtuous. Best of all — and this will not shock the Barb and Star hive — Dornan is an adroit comic performer, whether it’s expressing Irish-accented confusion about a fluffy stuffed koala or any of the bickering that characterizes The Man’s relationships with Helen and Luci. He weathers all of the reveals about his character, up to the finale’s conclusive twists. It’s just a darned good performance in a show that hinges on its lead."
• The Tourist gives freshness and punch to the cliché of the person with amnesia: "Writers Harry and Jack Williams (of The Missing and Baptiste) bring us some of the more intimate aspects of knowing nothing about yourself, including the grief that emerges and the inability to make a new start," says Matthew Gilbert. "Knowing you don’t have access to your own history and experience is an existential nightmare — something also portrayed powerfully on Apple TV+’s Severance."
• The writing on The Tourist is a metronomic back and forth between reveals and how those reveals propel the narrative in a new direction: "Pushing their way through all the chaos are Dornan and Macdonald, both phenomenal," says Brian Tallerico. "Dornan finds a quirky, unsettled way to play a man who doesn’t know who he is without resorting to the cliché of the lost soul. If anything, he leans into more of a blank slate interpretation of amnesia, playing a guy who’s more open to what comes next because he can’t remember what came before. And Macdonald is charming and so incredibly likable that she becomes the heart of a show that can be cold at times. Echoes of Memento and Fargo aside, The Tourist also has its own quirky personality."
• The Tourist is a boring ultimatum: "Having a main character who can’t remember anything can be an incredibly freeing and constricting prospect all at once," says Steve Greene. "Rarely does a story get the opportunity to follow someone with as close to a blank slate as you can get. But without the shortcuts of a protagonist with a baseline amount of knowledge about themselves, there’s a lot of gaps left to be filled by those on the periphery of that life. When presented the choice between these two possibilities, the new HBO Max original The Tourist opts for a heavy dose of the latter. What seems at the outset like a chance for Jamie Dornan to do some heavy existential lifting never quite makes good on that promise. Instead, The Tourist eventually settles into a conventional web of TV intrigue with one convenient mind wipe at the center."
• For all The Tourist's inventiveness, it reminds us that even good pop culture is often derivative: "The show's opening car crash sequence mimics the Steven Spielberg movie Duel. More importantly, the Williams brothers are pretty clearly doing a Down Under riff on Fargo," says John Powers. "Their series offers the same blend of violence and barbed humor, the same mythologizing of bleak, underpopulated places, and the same cavalcade of viciousness and folly that brings out the heroism in an ordinary person."
• Jamie Dornan found The Tourist script full of surprises: “Any time I thought it was one thing, or I had a handle on where it was heading, it was altered,” he says. “It was sometimes really subtle, and sometimes it was a big whack over the head.”