Jeff Bridges Stands Tall in FX’s Spy Thriller The Old Man: Review
The post Jeff Bridges Stands Tall in FX’s Spy Thriller The Old Man: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: AWOL CIA operative Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges) has been living off the grid in the foothills of Vermont for the last thirty years, the last five of them without his beloved wife (Hiam Abbass). With only his two Rottweilers and a boatload of secrets to keep him company, he’s measuring the last years of his life and hoping to live them out in secret.
Unfortunately, the ghosts of his past come to haunt him, and before long, the seventy-something is fighting off contract killers and going on the run — this time with an old friend, FBI director Harold Harper (John Lithgow), in reluctant pursuit, alongside his dedicated protege Angela Adams (Alia Shawkat). Fighting to survive, Chase will forge an unexpected partnership with Zoe (Amy Brenneman), a divorcee with a haunted past of her own, inadvertently drawing her into his web of intrigue as the noose begins to tighten around them.
The Old Man and the Sea-IA: It’s strange to watch The Old Man in the context of its production: it was delayed, as many things were, by COVID, but most notably also by Bridges’ own lymphoma diagnosis. (Luckily, he’s in remission; neither cancer nor assassins can keep The Dude down.)
But it’s an interesting wrinkle to attach to this show in particular, a series that’s at once a Jack Reacher-esque run-and-gun affair (the kind of thing, say, Liam Neeson would handle now if it was headed straight to Redbox) and a mournful drama about an old man reckoning with the trajectory of his life as he reaches the end of it. And for Bridges, it feels like a referendum on his own career, a reflection on all the Starmans and action heroes and grizzled cowboys he’s ever played, asserting that he’s still got it.
The Old Man (FX/Hulu)
And to his credit, he does. The Old Man plays like a fairly smart, if occasionally rote prestige action thriller that carves its novelty out from Bridges and his more prominent co-stars, a few expertly handled action scenes, and a more elegiac tone than your typical potboiler.
Over the four episodes provided for review, Bridges imbues Chase with a zen weariness that evokes the elan of modern-day Bridges (maybe he doesn’t end as many sentences with “man,” but still); he’s the kind of guy who’s lived a life and is just waiting out his final days, hopefully in peace. In flashbacks, we see he took care of his wife in the final years of her struggle with Huntington’s Disease, warm and reassuring even as she laments him having to see her like this. “I’m the man you promised to take care of,” he tells her warmly. “And who promised to take care of you.”
But of course, in shows like this, peace is hardly guaranteed, and director Jon Watts (blissfully able to step away from the full-CG cartoon spectacle of Spider-Man) shows a solid command of boots-on-the-ground fisticuffs in the first two episodes.
Episode 1, which spends much of its latter half in an extended back-and-forth between Chase and an assassin tasked with tracking him down, is downright revelatory in its visceral simplicity: all subtle, unshowy long-takes, some expert hiding of stunt doubles, and admirable stuntwork from Bridges himself where it counts. The Old Man‘s greatest feat, perhaps, is in showing us a septuagenarian who can still kick the ass of a licensed assassin and making us believe it… though the dogs certainly help.
While Chase does his level best to keep others away from harm (one of his earliest convos post-burning is with his at-the-time unseen daughter, who begs him not to cut off contact with her), circumstances lead him to renting a room from Zoe, which gives him a welcome taste of life in the world. Brenneman and Bridges have some fantastic chemistry together, with Chase and Zoe finding unexpected bonds over the mistakes of their past, and their desires to carve out new spaces for themselves. (The final scene in the four eps provided for review sees Brenneman making a dramatic shift in their power dynamic, and it’s just delicious to watch.)
Do You Recognize Me Now? On the other side of the law is Lithgow’s Harper, a wearied fixer at once in supreme command of his faculties and frustrated at the marginal position this particular job places him in. (He and Gary Oldman’s spymaster from Slow Horses would have a lot to talk about.)
Lithgow plays him with the grandfatherly twinkle in the eye we’ve come to expect, but one that evinces a tactical, precise level of danger even as he’s occasionally saddled with the comparatively boring spycraft politics stuff. Still, his dynamic with Shawkat is appropriately warm, the two having a kind of father-daughter dynamic that’s refreshing in these kinds of hardened spy capers.
The Old Man (FX/Hulu)
It’s too bad, though, that these game actors (and writers Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine) can only do so much to elevate the airport-thriller business of Thomas Perry’s original novel. In these kinds of cat-and-mouse tales, the scurrying of the mouse is innately more visceral and involving than the scheming of the cats, and a lot of the non-Bridges runtime is dedicated to internecine conflicts within varying intelligence agencies, the vaguely-Orientalist intrusion of a rich, shadowy Libyan ally upon domestic political affairs, and more.
Frequently, this place-setting bears fruit, whether in Lithgow’s long conversation with another old informant, played with remarkable brittleness by Joel Grey, or flashbacks that feature Bill Heck as a spot-on younger Bridges, as we see the circumstances that would see him running away from the CIA. And there are glimmers in here of justified criticism towards America’s meddling in the Middle East. But at times, it feels like we’re running in place, and the audience will invariably ask, “Where’s Jeff Bridges?”
The Verdict: More than just a showcase for Bridges, The Old Man is an unsparing, action-packed series about what happens when we live long enough to see the sins of the past thrown back in our faces, and how far we’ll go to protect those we love from seeing our darker selves. And despite having to wrestle with some boilerplate spy-thriller tropes from time to time, the show around it (and the strength of its players) is more than enough to make up for a little repetition. Besides, the mere fact that Bridges is here, healthy, and better than ever is more than enough reason to give it a look.
Where’s It Playing: The Old Man rolls into town with a couple of big doggos and an eye for revenge on FX and Hulu starting June 16th.
Trailer:
Jeff Bridges Stands Tall in FX’s Spy Thriller The Old Man: Review
Clint Worthington
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