Keeley Hawes’ complicated assassin is a bit hit (and miss) in manic thriller

The Assassin ★★★

Superficially at least, The Assassin has a lot in common with The Day of the Jackal. A professional killer attempting to juggle domestic life with the nuts and bolts of blood and guts. A secret past that threatens to catch up with our antihero. A vow to quit the old life, but a past that keeps dragging them back in.

Tonally, though, The Assassin is a very different beast. Created by English brothers Harry and Jack Williams, it has much more in common with their Australian-set The Tourist. It is manic, improbable, full of coincidences and overlapping character arcs and plot lines. It strives to marry comedy, action and drama, and gets the balance right some of the time, but not always.

Julie (Keeley Hawes) in The Assassin.

At the heart of everything is Keeley Hawes as Julie, a would-be retired assassin. We first meet her sprawled out on a deckchair on a beach in Greece, an empty whiskey bottle in her lap. Is she having too much fun, or simply trying to drown her sorrows? Turns out, a bit of both.

Actually, we first meet her in a prologue set 31 years earlier, in which a masked assassin storms a stronghold (presumably drug dealers, or some other undefined bad guys), defies the odds and takes out everyone, and leaves behind a pile of money that has been offered as an attempted bribe in exchange for sparing the chief baddie’s life. The assassin declines on both fronts.

Only at the end of the sequence does the balaclava come off, to reveal said assassin is a woman, just as the timer on her wristwatch goes off. She pulls a pregnancy test from her pocket. It’s positive. “F---.”

As character sketches go, it’s remarkably to the point. Julie is all-action, tough, oddly moral, and a reluctant parent. If only the rest of the show were as efficient.

The latter-day Julie is soon joined by her son Edward (Freddie Highmore, from The Good Doctor), a journalist, a vegan, as softly spoken and diffident as she is forthright, fierce and fearless.

Theirs is a prickly relationship. They haven’t seen each other for four years. She’s told him she is a headhunter (which, to be fair, she kind of is). He hasn’t yet told her he’s about to get married. She thinks he’s gay, though he’s not. Close? Not exactly.

He breaks the news to her at a wedding on the small Greek island on which she lives. Moments later, a gunman opens fire, wiping out almost everyone. Julie is convinced they’re after her, and she’s right. And somehow, everything ties back decades.

I’m not sure I quite buy Hawes as an action hero, but I am totally there for her as a complex woman with a rich backstory (which includes multiple lovers, any of whom might be the father Edward desperately longs to find). There’s something perversely delightful, too, in seeing her back in a Mediterranean setting, but in a story with none of the bucolic charm of The Durrells.

Highmore, though, is a little too low-wattage for my liking. And the plotting involving Edward’s fiancee Kayla (Shalom Brune-Franklin) and her mega-wealthy Australian family (brother Ezra, played by Devon Terrell – Brune-Franklin’s co-star in Netflix’s Arthurian drama series Cursed – and father Aaron, played by Alan Dale) is confusing and drawn out well beyond suspense, to the point of tedium.

The Assassin isn’t a dead loss by any means. But it is a bit hit and miss.

The Assassin streams on Stan from July 25.

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