The star is excellent in her return as a midlife assassin. But her whiny son is so annoying, the drama disintegrates into a soggy spy sitcom – he might just have killed the whole show
So there’s an assassin, right? Except, it’s not just AN assassin, it’s THE assassin. The world’s top assassin. Going round doing the most elite assassinations you can think of, being paid millions to kill super-dangerous people. Right? OK, But … it’s a woman – no, not like in Killing Eve. Well, OK, it is quite a lot like Killing Eve but wait: it’s not just a woman, it’s a sarcastic middle-aged British woman who hasn’t got time for anyone’s shit, And she’s got a difficult relationship with her adult son who doesn’t know she’s a killer! Boom!
One day a few years ago, prolific TV thriller writers Harry and Jack Williams (since The Missing in 2014 they’ve created Rellik, The Widow, Liar, Baptiste, Angela Black, Boat Story and The Tourist) pitched something like the above in a meeting with Prime Video, and walked out of the room with a big bag of money and a commission for another of their slick, twisty dramas. With Keeley Hawes as sardonic mercenary Julie Green and Freddie Highmore as her wan, bookish journalist son Edward, the premise of The Assassin just about survived a chaotic first season that benefited from placing its two leads inside a labyrinthine conspiracy.
In brief: Edward, who during an investigation into a dodgy mining company had fallen in love with the CEO’s daughter Kayla (Shalom Brune-Franklin), made a rare visit to his mum Julie’s Greek-island hideout, during which gunmen attacked her. Fleeing with Edward, Julie recognised Kayla as the person she had recently been hired to kill, but instead of carrying out the hit, she hunted the people who wanted her and Kayla dead. One foiled blackmail plot and a lot of MacGuffins later, it was revealed that Julie is not Edward’s biological mother – she picked him up as a baby 30 years ago after being sent to kill his father, and raised him as her own.
View image in fullscreenStill enjoying her work … Hawes as Julie Green. Photograph: AmazonSeason two opens with Edward and Kayla’s wedding, to which Julie is not invited because something has gone down between her and Edward on a trip to Berlin to find his biological mum. Julie is not bothered: she’s struggling with insomnia but we see her still enjoying her work, calmly gunning down a cartel boss and his numerous henchmen. Then on honeymoon in Spain, Kayla is kidnapped and, because the local police seem to be in on it, Edward has to call Julie for help.
The Assassin begins to disintegrate in the new episodes, but not because of the wonky plot. Yes, the Williams brothers write as if their delete key is broken, wandering into narrative dead ends before leaping implausibly free; and yes, the answers to the secrets and mysteries they bombard the viewer with (Who snatched Kayla? What happened in Berlin? Who’s the guy that followed Julie to Spain and evidently has ancient beef with her?) are always going to slip through your fingers like sand, because every new revelation is only meant to be just barely interesting enough to get you to the next one.
All of that is fine. The issue is the central pairing, who are now established – and bringing them into focus confirms that one of those characters is frustrating, and the other is unbearable. Highmore doesn’t do anything wrong as Edward, but he’s written as a worrywart whose pathological cowardice and whining drag on the show like an anchor on a caravan. Thrillers often include a fearful civilian embroiled in a situation they don’t have the skills for, but Edward is a far too pathetic caricature of an intellectual pacifist who keeps imploring Julie to avoid resorting to violence, even after violent criminals have abducted his wife and repeatedly tried to kill him. At a stretch you could say it’s a gender-flipped subversion of the old sexist trope where an elite spy/assassin/detective is yoked to a hysterical female companion who can’t stop screaming. But it’s still no fun to hang out with someone this annoying.
Similarly, Hawes’s predictably excellent turn as Julie is in spite of a script that barely bothers with the specifics of her as menopausal – of how experiencing rage might interact with a job that involves using extreme force, or how a lone-wolf killer might be a metaphor for a stage of life where one stops caring what society thinks. Instead, it renders her as a generic smart arse with a cheeky non-PC streak: to get a rise out of Edward, she refers to a French Interpol agent as “Onions” and a rogue police officer with a metal prosthetic leg as “RoboCop”. Scene after scene with this supposedly unstoppable murder machine is just small-time sitcom bickering. For a show that hopes we’ll invest in its grand concept enough to binge another season, that is fatal.