My heart leapt when I first read the words “Keeley Hawes” and “assassin” in the same sentence. One of Britain’s best television actors playing a retired assassin who is hauled into her old violent life – it sounds like a plot cooked up with the sole purpose to get on all the “best TV of 2025” lists. But hope breeds eternal misery. After watching the first four episodes of The Assassin (the remaining two were not made available to critics), I am bitterly disappointed.
The first sign that The Assassin is sub-par comes in the very first scene. It’s 1994 in Bulgaria and we’re watching a balaclava-clad hitwoman punching and slicing her way upstairs towards their target. It’s violent and full throttle (with strangely animated blood spatters) – until, job done, she pulls a pregnancy test from nowhere, indicating that she is with child. Now, I’m not au fait with the work of an assassin, but I’d be surprised if they really do carry around pregnancy tests.
Skip forward a few decades and that hitwoman – Julie, now played by Hawes – has retired to a sparsely populated Greek island. Far from ingratiating herself with the locals, Julie isn’t well-liked on the island. It’s easy to see why when she begins bullying local children and pushing to the front of the queue at the butchers. Alas, she has good reason: her son Edward (Freddie Highmore) is coming to visit after four years apart.
There is very little time to enjoy Julie’s spikiness, nor her fraught relationship with Edward, who seems to be the only one who can match her relentlessly grating sarcasm. Before you know it, Julie is randomly given an assassination job that sets off a chain of events that leads to almost everyone on the island being slaughtered by a sniper at an open-air wedding. Someone wants Julie dead – we just don’t know who or why. And frankly, with an attitude like hers, I struggle to care.
Creators Harry and Jack Williams aren’t known to stick to the parameters of anything as pedantic as reality (as anyone who watched their BBC drama The Tourist knows all too well). But The Assassin pushes the boundaries of reasonable storytelling beyond comprehension. Rather than it being a simple yet propulsive high-stakes cat-and-mouse chase, we’re asked to invest in a slew of secondary characters, from the Greek butcher who survives the shooting to Edward’s fiancée… and her brother… and their dad.
The mysteries don’t stop coming – who is Edward’s real dad? Who is the man we keep visiting in a Libyan prison? – yet the revelations never feel satisfying. The Assassin moves along at such a zippy pace that it’s hard to keep up with the tangled mess of storylines.
There are glimmers of light, though. When Hawes and Highmore are given the space to spar, their spikey chemistry is off the charts – I’d much rather watch a series about a son getting to grips with his mother’s past as a hitwoman than this forgettable, sloppy attempt at an international espionage thriller.
With its country-hopping, string-led theme and geopolitical edge, it’s painfully obvious that The Assassin wants to emulate James Bond. But if this is Hawes’s audition to become the next 007, then she’s completely let down by thin characterisation and a shoddy, juvenile script – “Somebody’s coming” and “Let’s go” aren’t phrases Daniel Craig’s Bond ever urgently whispered. I’m not sure what made her say yes to such an underwhelming series, but I bet the Greek sun had something to do with it.
‘The Assassin’ is streaming on Prime Video
