White Lines review: Netflix mystery starring Daniel Mays and Laurence Fox has all the gear but no idea

Laurence Fox, Alex Pina and director Nick Hamm have created a lumpy, leaden first episode that contrives to be, of all things, dull. Actually, to be fair to Fox, he’s not even in the opener

In theory, White Lines (Netflix), a 10-part murder mystery set in Ibiza, is very much my bag. There are Balearic beaches, shimmering seas, Romanian gangsters, clubs filled with fit extras, orgies, murders and an inflatable banana full of cocaine. Speaking of which, Laurence Fox is in it, too.

The soundtrack bulges with Manchester classics and Euro-house nonsense. Most enticingly of all, the creator is Alex Pina, the Spanish maestro behind Netflix’s biggest non-English hit, Money Heist, a stylish and compelling thriller about robbers who seize the Royal Mint in Madrid. If you were setting out to make a slick, sun-drenched Anglo-Spanish thriller, his would be the first name on the list. I looked at all this and thought, yes, that’ll be a laugh, some summery trash to take my mind off the fact I’ll never leave the house again.

So I am baffled to report that somehow, from these promising elements, and Laurence Fox, Pina and director Nick Hamm have created a lumpy, leaden first episode that contrives to be, of all things, dull. Actually, to be fair to Fox, he’s not even in the opener. He was heavily trailed, mostly by himself in The Times, but you must wait until the second episode to see his turn as a raver-turned-cult-guru, and hear his Manchester-Yorkshire-West Country accent. To be even fairer to Fox, he has spent a lot of time crafting the image of someone you might get off with on holiday only to discover they went to Harrow.

In the opening scene, Zoe Walker (Laura Haddock) and her husband arrive in present-day Almeria, southern Spain, to identify the body of her brother Axel (Tom Rhys Harries), who went missing 20 years ago. Axel was a fun- and drug-loving DJ whose corpse has mummified in the desert, like King Tootenkhamun or Ramesesh. He was thought to be in India, so it’s suspicious that he has appeared on land owned by the Calafat family, who own lots of clubs in Ibiza and want to build a new casino. Zoe sends her husband back home to look after their child while she heads to Ibiza to investigate her brother’s disappearance. There she meets Marcus (Daniel Mays), Axel’s best friend, now 44, who still lives on the island and supplements his DJ’ing income by selling drugs. He has problems of his own: chiefly Romanian smugglers and an ex-wife, Anna (Angela Griffin), who runs elite sex parties. In flashback, we start to see the events that led up to Axel’s disappearance, as Axel, Marcus and two other friends leave the, er, oppressive authoritarianism of Nineties Manchester to pursue their dreams.

Visually, it has that sun-bleached nightmarish quality of a hangover abroad, when everything is slightly too bright, and it must have cost a packet. There are one or two good jokes, although it is far too pleased with itself about the banana boat scene. Pina is skilled at juggling different strands, building them in to each other and sucking you in with twists. The problem is mainly the acting. Zoe talks to her therapist via video call, in scenes designed to invest us in her quest, but Haddock, best known for the Guardians of the Galaxy films, is oddly flat. Mays seemingly can’t decide whether to play Marcus for dissolute menace or slapstick lovability, and falls into the cracks between the two. The Nineties sections are more interesting, but they come too slowly for us to feel there’s much at stake. White Lines has all the gear, but no idea.