“Implausible” is the word that springs to mind with The Assassin. This is frustrating, because so much of the production is absolutely plausible – to the extent that, while watching it, I actually felt like I was on set and part of the action, of which there is plenty. Like anything made by brothers Harry and Jack Williams (The Missing, The Tourist), this Prime Video thriller has care and high production values built into it. There are the exquisite Riviera villas, the shabby Paris apartments, the dusty hills of Albania and the easy-going Greek tavernas, all of which lend a wonderful texture to proceedings. Everything moves at a brisk pace, and the body count is high.
Much of this taut quality is down to the presence of the now ubiquitous Keely Hawes, the entertainment industry’s undeclared Queen of Tense. She is ideally cast, then, as Julie Green, a semi-retired professional assassin (well, amateurs don’t last long in that game presumably), trying to keep herself to herself on an idyllic Greek island – but permanently on edge for fear of retribution. She can’t be blamed for wanting a quiet life after knocking off so many gangsters, politicians and oligarchs in her time. She’s made enough money to pack it in, which is just as well because hired killers don’t usually bother with an Aviva pension plan. “Ex-headhunter” is her amusing self-description if anyone asks; a “premenopausal James Bond” as someone calls her.
But is she left to retire in peace? God no. Green recoils when someone she thinks she knows calls her and asks her – with menace – to do “one last job” (a bit of a cliche, but a forgivable one). After an attempt on her life, with considerable collateral damage, she embarks on a blood-spattered tour by motorbike, Fiat 500 and luxury yacht across the Mediterranean coast. The circus also comprises her estranged journalist son Edward (played by Freddie Highmore, and no hack could be that dim), who is searching for his father; an improbably wealthy woman named Kayla (Shalom Brune-Franklin); her ketamine-addicted brother Ezra (Devon Terrell); their paranoid billionaire dad (Alan Dale); a predatory cougar (Gina Gershon, who commands attention in a highly disturbing sex scene); a jolly Greek butcher (Richard Dormer); and a bonkers Dutch ID bod, Jasper (David Dencik). A lot of supporting artistes, then, who consequently tend towards sketchily drawn two-dimensional “types”.
Green is running for her life, her lad is looking for his dad, and the others are all greedy for the money they sense is just around the next plot twist. There is a MacGuffin at the centre of all of this chaos – no one knows who or what “Chantaines” is, except that it matters. A lot of it doesn’t make sense – to the characters or the viewer – and the show occasionally descends into plain daft, with Green having abilities more worthy of a superhero than an unassuming gun for hire. She routinely takes down muscle-bound henchmen without breaking a sweat, and fluently speaks about half a dozen languages.
The Assassin is also spoiled by being overly derivative, to the point of being distracting. The soundtrack is too reminiscent of a Bond movie, and the old billionaire bloke sounds and behaves uncannily like a knowing parody of Succession’s Logan Roy, surrounded by what he calls his “not serious” potential heirs. A little in-joke, I presume. Meanwhile, Edward’s hunt for his dad – because Mum would rather shoot and stab her way across Europe rather than tell him the name – has a few too many Darth “I am your father” Vader moments. None of that is criminal, and doesn’t stop The Assassin from being intriguing and very, very nearly working – but it renders it frustrating. After all, as Hawes’s hitwoman would know, the difference between success and failure for a sniper is a question of mere millimetres.
