'The Sympathizer' review: Even Robert Downey Jr. can't make the HBO show make sense

A TV show shouldn't have to try so hard to be great.

HBO's "The Sympathizer" has all the appearances of a prestigious, Emmy-worthy series. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning 2015 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, it has weighty subject matter (the Vietnam War and espionage), the star power of Robert Downey, Jr. and beloved South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook as one of its masterminds. It's produced by buzzy indie studio A24.

Yet in spite of all this talent and raw potential, "Sympathizer" (Sundays, 9 EDT/PDT, and streaming on Max, ★½ out of four) is the dictionary definition of underwhelming. Overly complicated, overly stylized and often boring, Park and co-creator Don McKellar can't coalesce the series' shifting timelines, disparate characters, cartoonish costuming and moral ambiguity into a story that pulls you in. It's a whole lot of stuff shoved in your face with very little resonance to show.

The series' protagonist, the never-named Captain (Hoa Xuande), begins the story as a Viet Cong plant in the South Vietnamese secret police in the mid-1970s, just before the end of the war. To the Americans and the South Vietnamese, he's the loyal lieutenant to a foppish, idiotic General (Toan Le). But he's secretly passing intelligence to the communists on the other side of the border. When the general and the Americans flee the country as Saigon falls, the Captain is ordered by the Viet Cong to continue feeding information to his superiors as a refugee in Los Angeles.

There he goes on his own personal odyssey, often surrounded by white paternalistic figures who aim to use the Captain in some way. All of them are played by Robert Downey Jr. in various states of prosthetic makeup: A CIA operative, a college professor, a film director and a congressman. The captain also begins a steamy affair with Sofia Mori (Sandra Oh), an older Japanese American woman who's as eager to rid herself of association with her Asian heritage as the captain is to cling to his.

It's a lot to keep track of, and even harder when the series can't make you care about the captain or his scheming and spying. The stakes are muddled, and the characters feel like symbols more than people.

The series deals in binaries, not quite as clever a device as the creators think it is. In addition to being a double agent, the captain is biracial, half French and half Vietnamese. One of his best friends is a devoted communist, and another a soldier of the South. The captain is deeply dedicated to communism and his homeland but is easily seduced by American popular culture. He refuses to live in shades of gray and thus becomes an (intentionally) confused, ever-shifting figure. It all has the unfortunate side effect of distancing the protagonist from us. He is neither appealing enough to engender loyalty and investment, nor interesting enough to hold our gaze as an antihero.

The bigger problem, however, is the series' multiple timelines. There is a rough frame structure in which the captain relates the story of his time in America to his superiors, clearly under some kind of imprisonment and duress. And yes, humans don't always tell stories in the right order. But any insight gleaned from the constantly shifting timeline is sacrificed by the confusion it creates. And this sort of blatantly pretentious "artistic choice" attempts to mask the fact that the story underneath is not particularly compelling. While I've not read the novel, it's easy to see how this kind of lackadaisical pace and intentionally obfuscating timeline works on the written page, where readers can take the text at their own speed and an omniscient narrator can be so much more effective. On screen, it's just a bit dull and dense.

It's a shame because "The Sympathizer" offers a perspective on American imperialism that's so often lost to our culture. Stories about the Vietnam War are almost always told from the viewpoint of the American soldier, all "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now." But we weren't the protagonists; it wasn't our country that was tearing itself apart. The much-praised novel deconstructed Americans' perception of the conflict. But by the time you finish the series, you're likely to be nonplussed, which is one of the worst criticisms I could offer a piece of art. It's not good, it's not bad, it's just unaffecting.

Considering the intensely political and moral questions the series raises, it should create some kind of philosophical and emotional response in us. And yet I cannot sympathize.