‘Treasure Island’ Review: David Oyelowo and Hayley Atwell Can Only Breathe So Much Life Into MGM+’s Handsome but Undercooked Pirate Adventure

You cannot fault Treasure Island, MGM+’s new take on the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, for a lack of effort. Where some adaptations of beloved literary works might be content to recreate the source material beat for beat, creator Robert Murphy reimagines it wholesale.

Characters and plot elements are mixed and matched with abandon. Themes of subjugation and rebellion are brought to the forefront, while real historical events like the Haitian Revolution play out in the background.

Treasure Island

The Bottom Line Admirably ambitious, disappointingly flat.

Airdate: Sunday, Oct. 11 (MGM+)
Cast: Tom Sweet, David Oyelowo, Hayley Atwell, Jack Huston, Tomer Capote, Tristan Sturrock, Craige Els, Neil Pendleton, Mayen Mehta, George Frost, Tadghe Murphy
Creator: Robert Murphy

The main cast is strong (David Oyelowo, playing the famed pirate Long John Silver, proves particularly adept at doing a lot with a little) and the detailed settings appealingly solid. In its intention to dazzle you with swashbuckling thrills in the moment, and leave you with deeper ideas to chew on in the aftermath, Treasure Island shows admirable ambition. It’s the execution, flat and repetitive and ultimately rather dreary, that lets it down.

It takes a while to reveal its shortcomings, however. Initially, there’s plenty to be intrigued by. Our hero to come of age is Jim Hawkins (Tom Sweet), a sweet-natured fellow with the height of a man, the acne-spotted cheeks of a teenager, the wide-eyed innocence of a boy and, most importantly to the plot, the eidetic memory of almost no one of any age. Jim and his widowed mother, Bess (Hayley Atwell), are barely scraping by running a bustling tavern, even with the occasional extra coin they pull in by having drunkards bet on Jim’s gift for perfect recall.

Then hopes of a better life suddenly wash up ashore in the form of Billy Bones (The Boys’ Tomer Capone), a shipwrecked pirate telling a wild tale of buried treasure and toting the cryptic map to prove it. Unfortunately for Billy but fortunately, in theory, for Treasure Island’s ability to craft a rip-roaring adventure, he’s not the only one after this legendary trove. As Jim and Bess race to the Caribbean on a ship chartered by a wealthy merchant, Graham (Jack Huston), they find themselves unwelcomely accompanied by Long John Silver, who was none too pleased when his former crewmate Billy absconded with that map.

The first few of Treasure Island‘s six hour-long chapters manage to stay afloat thanks to some helpful assets. One is that it is generally quite handsome, in a polished if not especially inventive way. From baroque European manors to endless blue seas to overgrown jungles, the world looks expansive and lived-in — no small thing at a time when big series like this so often look overrun with green screen. It’s easy to want to keep looking at this show.

More crucially, it benefits from a few performers capable of popping through the screen on sheer power of their charisma. The most compelling figure is Long John Silver, whose every glare or sneer or smirk Oyelowo imbues with a whole spectrum of feeling — the fury of a formerly enslaved man who’s had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap he’s ever gotten, the icy calculation of one clever and tough enough to have won all those battles, the flashes of decency still buried somewhere deep within.

The most fun is Bess, a scheming single mom whose ability to manipulate lovelorn men is akin to a superpower. Atwell makes her slyly funny and unapologetically mercenary — I laughed at how little she bothers to hide her delight when Huston’s Graham speaks of being lonely after his wife’s passing — and she’s never more appealing than when she’s paired with Capone, who gives off his own louche pan-Continental sex appeal. When they’re talking low and close, Treasure Island flirts with transitioning, incongruously but amusingly, into an overheated bodice-ripper.

Atwell and Oyelowo are working so hard, in fact, that it’s initially easy to overlook how thin the writing really is. The dynamics between the characters are complicated in the sense that they’re nearly all informed by ulterior motives and mutable loyalties. Everyone’s forever making false promises, or planning mutinies, or framing one another for murder, such that keeping up with their crisscrossing alliances becomes a head-spinning challenge. Emotionally, however, the experience feels empty, not least because most of these characters are defined and driven only by their desire for gold. You might as well be watching computers outwit each other at chess.

Once again, the flatness does not entirely seem to be for lack of trying. Treasure Island likes and understands Bess well enough to give her a chance to explain that, as a woman in a man’s world, “I am all I have to trade” — can you blame her for deploying her feminine wiles to get ahead? It’s curious enough about Silver to grant Oyelowo a brief but bitter monologue recounting his youth spent in bondage, and all the horrors he endured therein — the pirate-infested seas may be “no place for an honest man,” but doesn’t it contain a few antiheroes worth rooting for anyway?

But then, having raised these ideas, Treasure Island simply leaves them hanging in the air, unconnected to much of anything else. They’re serious but simplistic motivations, and ones all the harder to trust because when everyone is so duplicitous it’s nearly impossible to tell if anyone means anything they’re saying.

Even the one clearly earnest bond in the ensemble, between Bess and Jim, lacks a meaningful sense of history or nuance — I couldn’t begin to guess how such a cunning woman raised such a naïve kid, or what lessons he’s learned or rejected under her guidance. While it doesn’t help that young Sweet is outmatched by his more experienced costars, it’s hard to place the blame on him when there’s such scant evidence of depth anywhere else either. When the parent-child bond is fractured, the show barely bothers to give Jim a moment of reflection or regret before it simply barrels ahead to the next plot point.

In the series’ defense, those plot points involve objectively exciting things like an armed revolution, an aristocratic dinner party, a trek through the jungle, an active volcano and more guns held to temples and knives held to throats than any human could reasonably be expected to keep track of. (Not much graphic violence, though, give or take an upsetting shot of a murdered cat.) You can see why Jim and his companions would want to rush headlong toward them.

It’s just that in the absence of any reason to care all that much about the fates of these characters, even a raucous bar fight or a daring escape turns out to be a slog. If it’s a cliché that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way, it’s one Treasure Island proves true via the negative: Without anyone to feel for, even the most glittering cache of ill-gotten jewels might be rendered dull and mundane.