David Duchovny ‘Ripley’ Riff is lame

For a thriller, the Amazon Prime Video series “Malice” is strangely devoid of suspense. From the start, it’s clear that handsome, affable Adam (Jack Whitehall) is up to no good when he shows up at the Greek holiday home of the ultra-rich Tanner family. We know this because “Malice” opens with a flash-forward to Adam being detained by customs officials at an American airport and then presented with evidence that a terrible, but unspecified, fate has befallen Tanner patriarch Jamie (David Duchovny). Adam doesn’t even feign surprise, telling his interrogator that Jamie was “not a nice guy.” That “Malice” never returns to this teaser is one of many signs that the show is strangely listless, both loosely plotted and lacking in tension.

Creator and writer James Wood (“The Great,” “Trying”) underlines three times that Adam is a dark intruder with an image so visually astute that I hesitate to use the term “metaphor.” Adam’s arrival — as a tutor to the children of the Tanners’ close friends, Jules (Christine Adams) and Damien (Raza Jaffrey), invited to the families’ shared weekend getaway — is precipitated by a snake that infiltrates the Tanners’ azure pool. The scene swaps water for grass, but the meaning is the same: Adam is bad news and cannot be trusted. Would you believe the Tanners wouldn’t heed the symbolic warning?

Adam wastes no time in currying favor with all five Tanners: Jamie, a ragtag venture capitalist; Nat (Carice van Houten), a model turned fashion entrepreneur; their children April (Teddie Allen) and Dexter (Phoenix Laroche); and Kit (Harry Gilby), Jamie’s son from a previous marriage. There are already cracks in the Tanners’ smooth veneer of prosperity, even before Adam begins to exploit them. Kit gets into some unspecified trouble at school, a vague conflict that never reveals whether the teen has actually done anything wrong and thus much about his personality. Jamie finances Nat’s affairs and keeps her firmly under his control: “She has all the style and taste and I have all the money,” he explains. Before Jules and Damien arrive with Adam in tow, the two have perfunctory sex while Nat flips through a magazine, a genuinely funny image that portends more tongue-in-cheek satire to come.

But “Malice” loses this sense of playfulness once Adam gets to work. The six episodes suffer from a lack of solid perspective. Adam’s intentions are never hidden; he announces to a drunken, unconscious Jamie that “I could kill you right now if I wanted to – but I’m not going to, because I want you to suffer” on his very first night in town. And “Malice” doesn’t cultivate any mystery around whether Jamie had it coming, as Adam claims. Jamie comes across as an insensitive jerk, but Adam is So creepy, there’s no doubt who the bad guy is here.

Yet “Malice” obscures just enough of Adam’s nefarious actions to take away from the joy of watching an elaborate plan being executed to perfection. For example, he appears to frame Jamie for physically assaulting the Tanners’ older Greek neighbor during their drunken escapades, but we never see him do so. There’s no mention of responsibility – only of how Adam hid his identity or got away from Jamie long enough to seriously beat a stranger. One wonders if “Malice” just didn’t feel like answering such questions and decided to skip them.

We’re also not completely in the Tanners’ position because we can’t walk with them. Damien briefly takes on the role of the suspicious investigator who digs into Adam’s past while everyone else happily plays along, but his storyline is quickly cast aside before he finds anything interesting or revealing. (He does confront Adam with a news report showing him being arrested in Thailand for murdering a sex worker. Adam unconvincingly claims that the perpetrator is an estranged half-brother. Is this Southeast Asian interlude ever explained further? Not so! But we do get sporadic, random scenes of Adam hanging out at sex clubs to show that something is going on with him.)

Even Adam’s motive for targeting Jamie is easy to deduce and creates no surprise when it is eventually laid out. The presence of Adam’s sister Sophie (Charlotte Riley) is indicative of the series’ frustrating half-in, half-out approach. Their conversations reveal just enough to keep Adam from becoming an intriguing enigma, but remain so superficial that they leave major blind spots in his backstory. The locations also alternate unproductively: Adam follows the Tanners back to London before returning to Greece in the finale. Instead of the one-way focus going horribly wrong, we get a little taste of the Tanners’ typical routine before it’s disrupted.

“Malice” arrives a year and a half after the Netflix series “Ripley” brought Patricia Highsmith’s iconic con artist back into the spotlight. A relatively impoverished con man who worms his way into the life of a wealthy target with murderous intent immediately evokes Tom Ripley in his many incarnations, from Highsmith’s writing to Anthony Minghella’s sun-drenched, star-studded film. (Or Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn,” a de facto Ripley story but technically an original work.) The recent success of HBO’s “The White Lotus” and its many imitators raises the bar even higher: The culture is now awash with rich people behaving badly and sometimes getting their comeuppance in a beautiful location. “Malice” has little to add to this long list of antecedents. Neither Duchovny nor Whitehall, who works primarily as a comedian, deepen their characters beyond “heartless rich man” or “vengeful psychopath.” From performances to plot, much of “Malice” feels like it’s happening on autopilot. When you look at it, it feels pretty much the same.

All six episodes of “Malice” are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.