With a title like The Assassin, viewers can rest assured they won’t be left guessing on what this series is about. Fortunately, there’s enough twists and humour to offer thriller and crime lovers a novel take on a classic genre. There’s also the magic ingredients: a luscious Greek island, and the sometimes steely, sometimes sultry and sweet Keeley Hawes.
The Assassin can also viably lay claim to being a top-notch family drama in which the mother-son dynamic is thrown into disarray when an adult Edward treks off to meet his long-distant mother in (seeming) retirement on a sunny Greek island. The reunion is shattered by an attempted assassination on Julie’s life, which she succinctly concludes without breaking a sweat.
Still, the event is enough to send Julie and Edward on an unexpected European getaway jaunt, during which the duo have to work out who is after them and why, and how they’re going to conduct their relationship as adults, and family, that barely know each other.
As the pugnacious, kind-of-annoying-really Edward, Freddy Highmore is a jittery, bratty son. Cynical viewers will immediately empathise with Julie running to the other end of the Mediterranean to escape him. He’s also, frankly, juvenile and thoroughly disrespectful of a woman who raised him alone and has saved both of their lives repeatedly. I mean, sure, she probably dumped them both in the most dangerous of circumstances imaginable by being a hired assassin in the first place, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
It’s brilliantly fun to watch Keeley Hawes transition from her early career ingenue roles in British romance dramas (Our Mutual Friend, Tipping the Velvet, via crime and mystery classics like Spooks and Ashes to Ashes, Line of Duty, and into her present niche of powerful, take-no-shit women who defy the underestimations of the men around them, whether that’s colleagues, lovers, or—in this case—offspring.
Let’s be real, Bodyguard was a pretty underwhelming series, despite two fantastic leads (Hawes and her bodyguard, Game of Thrones star Richard Madden). Consider The Assassin a flip of the script, and a redemptive offering. Rather than your average retired-assassin-returns-for-one-last-job cliché, which is typically a muscled, gruff dude with a secret armoury in the attic, Julie isn’t all about backflipping, knife-throwing, Catwoman-style prowess.
Sure, she can pull some mean moves, but there’s heart to this series that opens it up to a broader audience than purely crime drama lovers.
The humour is distinctly British, which will thrill those of us who love a joke about cold tea or a Goodies-style visual gag. The opening scenes introduce us to Julie as a young woman, carrying out a (pretty gruesome) assassination then, as if it’s perfectly usual, checking a pregnancy test and discovering—inconveniently—that she is indeed going to be a mum.
This series exists in the same realm as mother-son dramas (literally, Mother and Son!), and hitman-back-on-the-beat dramas. Think of Jeff Bridges in The Old Man, or the key relationships in Slow Horses, where River Cartwright’s actual father was MI5, and his relationship with the slovenly Jackson Lamb is a dysfunctional, but fatherly, kinship. It’s not a wild leap to see Kristin Scott Thomas’s MI5 head honcho, Diana Taverner, as a heavy influence on Julie’s cool, calculated, but sneakily funny, killer.
It’s hard not to view The Assassin outside of our current political context. Women, especially in the US, are facing the swift reversals of their bodily autonomy and independence. Women globally still face enormous risk of violence and sexual assault, earn less, fare worse in life expectancy when they marry, suffer undue risks in childbirth, and generally exist in a more dangerous world.
Not to be too much of a Debbie Downer, but it’s rough out here. The prospect of having a secret skill, like knowing how to stab a deadly brute with a cake fork to disarm him, or wielding a mean roundhouse kick? Pretty appealing. It’s a power play.
Look, the initial seat-of-your pants ride that the first couple of episodes speeds along on doesn’t keep up the momentum to the end, and the eventual reasoning for this whole adventure is a bit of a head-scratcher, but it’s a helluva lot of fun watching Keeley Hawes having a riot of a time, and there’s a handful of instantly recognisable stars worth tuning in for (Alan Dale and Gina Gershon are great).
It neatly wraps a whole drama in one, fully-formed series too, so there’s no cliffhangers and no loose threads that entertain a bunch more series to jump the shark. Is it all killer, no filler? Watch it and decide.
