Jeff Bridges Delights in Disney+’s Shocking Spy Thriller The Old Man – Review

It’s hard to believe at first Old man could be a spy thriller. The Disney+ the series opens with a mighty Jeff Bridges moaning to put on socks. His aging but listless CIA agent – ​​the all-too-aptly named Dan Chase – makes a doctor’s appointment to talk about ailments he doesn’t even have. “When I was a little girl, you were the king,” the daughter tells him, seemingly rehearsing the lines for her father’s eulogy.

But soon his truncated royal past catches up with him and forces him to return to imperial form. Turns out it’s like riding a bike. By the end of the first hour, Dan wipes out the upstarts sent to apprehend him in a deadly time that belongs in a Bond film. When one of the enemies spits, “Fuck you, man,” at the end of a prolonged fistfight, Dan is finished off by his own dogs—who must have been lurking nearby the entire time. Why didn’t he call the dogs earlier? Probably because it looks cooler that way.

Based on the 2017 novel by Thomas Perry, this seven-episode series takes its time to reveal more precisely what mysterious acts committed during the Soviet-Afghan War have kept Dan on the run for the past 40 years. Also dangling is the connection between Dan and Harold Harper (John Lithgow), an FBI G-man called back from retirement to pursue him. Ultimately, the details are not as important as the personalities involved. Old man is a show about how far these men will go – even near the end of their lives – to save themselves.

The action is interrupted by flashbacks that reluctantly connect the past with the present. We see Dan, played by Bill Heck, in the 1980s as a young idealist among the Mujahideen, and watch him make the rash decision to abandon the cause. Heck is as convincing in his role as they come Alia Shawkat as Harold’s stony-faced protégé and EJ Bonilla as the agent who threatens to uncover Harold’s secrets. Too many characters in the series have a tendency to speak out of character, but they usually find themselves with something interesting to say.

Bridges, however, is charming in playing the many sides of his gaunt ghost—a widower haunted by his dead wife, a father facing his own mortality, an irrepressible charmer who manages to land a date (gentle, hurting Amy Brenneman) on a lamb. The garden variety of spy chat could be raised Busy or Mission Impossible, but Bridges delivers it in a convincing growl. “If you send me more, I’ll send it back in sacks,” Dan tells Harold in his “very special skill set” moment. “Whoever you send at my child, I send them back in pieces.”

Many Hollywood secret agents – James Bond, Ethan Hunt – do not want to get old and righteous enough. It’s a lot less fun to watch a creaky old man with a problem with his socks muster up the strength to make a last-ditch effort to sleep. But Dan and Harold don’t reject the spy life; they simply cannot escape. Their dark reluctance gives this familiar cat-and-mouse thriller the edge to transcend genre.