Is ‘The Consultant’ good? Here’s what the critics are saying

The first season of The Consultant was released on Amazon Prime Video at the end of last week – but is it worth a watch?

The Consultant is a twisted, comedic-thriller series that, according to the synopsis, “explores the sinister relationship between boss and employee.”

“When a new consultant, Regus Patoff (Christoph Waltz), is hired to improve the business at the app-based gaming company CompWare (following the murder of its previous CEO) employees experience new demands and challenges that put everything into question… including their lives.”

The first season of The Consultant was written as a “chapter” with creator and writer Tony Basgallop telling Collider that “maybe we’ll do a trilogy. Maybe one is enough. Maybe two will be right. I think if the materials are there, then we’ll continue.”

Here’s what the critics are saying about The Consultant

As it stands, The Consultant has a 75 per cent Fresh rating for critics reviews on Rotten Tomato but just a 54 per cent approval rating, based on audience reviews. “With Christoph Waltz’s menacing charm on retainer, The Consultant compensates for its lack of depth with slick presentation and diverting twists,” reads the summary.

Christoph Waltz steals the show…

Variety said Waltz’ performance as Patoff is “the best part of The Consultant” and praised how “the relentlessly garrulous actor is at his most interesting in the spaces between lines, when he radiates a genteel hostility.” while Radio Times praised how Waltz could be “both chilling and hilarious simultaneously.”

In a three-star review,  The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “The hook of The Consultant is sure to be Christoph Waltz, delivering a compulsively watchable performance that falls right into the Oscar winner’s comfort zone of seductive weirdness that is alternately reptilian and lupine,” adding that his performance “remains undeniably fun, a mixture of off-kilter line readings and odd physicality.”

But the overall plot of The Consultant is a little underwhelming

“Many plot threads remain unresolved in The Consultant,” wrote Vanity Fair. “This story seems like it would have been better suited to a feature film; once you start seeing the holes in the central mystery, the show that surrounds them doesn’t offer enough reasons to keep watching.”

“If you’re placing that much responsibility on one actor (Waltz) and one character in an eight-episode season, you’d darned well better do something impressive by the end. Or at least interesting,” added The Hollywood Reporter. “The Consultant does not.”

Variety explained how the theme of the workplace encroaching on all aspects of one’s personal life is explored in a “fanciful and at times frankly silly [manner] but it’s just enough to serve as intellectual ballast on a show that’s otherwise (mainly) pleasantly goofy.”

Paste wrote: “Unfortunately, the story here is not exceptional. Impressively claustrophobic, dystopian, and discomfiting? Yes, absolutely. But that’s about all it’s got, and that’s not enough.”

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