The Consultant Series Premiere Review: A Forgettable Workplace Thriller With Too Much Build-Up
Amazon's The Consultant tries too hard to be mysterious and doesn't take advantage of its chief talent.
I watched The Consultant series premiere and its second episode shortly after they dropped on Amazon Prime Video, and by the end it became clear why — unlike other Prime originals like The Boys and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — the entire first season was dropped the same day on the streamer: because otherwise, it’s doubtful anyone would bother to remember the series in the following weeks. The Consultant has some great things going for it, with Christoph Waltz’s performance as the chilling Regus Patoff being chief among them, but it’s not enough to keep you locked in. You understand very quickly that Patoff is a bizarre and malevolent creature, perhaps even supernatural in origin, and once you figure that out, there isn’t much left to care about.
THE CONSULTANT SERIES PREMIERE REVIEW SCORE:
The Consultant premiere opens with tragedy at the game publisher CompWare. When a group of grade schoolers come to visit, one of them inexplicably pulls out a gun and murders the celebrity game creator Sang (Brian Yoon). When the smoke clears, the boy tells the authorities that the Devil made him do it.
Pretty much everyone at CompWare — including Sang’s assistant Elaine (Brittany O’Grady) and the disillusioned coder Craig (Nat Wolff) — believe it’s time to pack up and start looking for new employment, but then the mysterious Regus Patoff (Waltz) shows up literally in the middle of the night. Armed with a contract that puts him in charge of the struggling company, Patoff obsesses over smells, abruptly summons employees in the middle of the night, and often refers to the bullet-riddled Sang as if the game creator is still alive.
The Consultant is inspired by the 2016 novel of the same name by horror author Bentley Little, and fittingly I was reminded of the disappointment I felt reading a novel by another famous terror scribe: 1991’s Needful Things by Stephen King. The villain of the novel is a devilish store owner named Gaunt, and far too many of his appearances in the book are in short scenes overcrowded with hints that maybe, just maybe, he has supernatural powers. It was around what felt like the 30th of these short scenes set in Gaunt’s store, when King writes about Gaunt putting up a sign and makes a big deal about him (gasp) not needing scotch tape to do it, that I thought, “okay man, we get it, he’s evil and has powers, let’s move along.”
That’s the feeling you get watching The Consultant premiere and beyond. Regus Patoff is weird and evil, he does weird and evil things, and beyond that, there just isn’t a lot that moves this story along. Elaine and Craig aren’t particularly intriguing characters, and it feels like you can guess their character trajectory without even thinking about it.
I will admit that part of my dislike of The Consultant premiere may have something to do with how different it is from much of Waltz’s more well-known work. In Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained for example — both of which Waltz won Oscars for — Waltz’s most impressive scenes come with deliveries of long, wordy, and mesmerizing monologues. Meanwhile, in The Consultant, Waltz’s dialogue is sparse and it feels like a wasted opportunity.
One thing The Consultant does have going for it is its brevity. The episodes are only about a half-hour long, with only eight episodes in the first season, so even if you don’t like it, it isn’t a huge commitment.
I may even finish The Consultant in spite of not enjoying the premiere. One thing that kept crossing my mind was that the only way all the little hints could pay off is if the show reveals that Waltz’s Patoff is not a monster, and somehow manages to show how all the acts we saw as unholy were actually benign or even heroic. At a half-hour per episode, I’m just barely willing to be curious.
If you’re curious enough, The Consultant‘s entire first season is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
