TV: The Old Man (2022)

Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow face off as hardened, weary U.S. intelligence agents

The Old Man (2022)

Streaming on Hulu, Season I

Jeff Bridges as Dan Chase making a getaway with two loyal helpmates in The Old Man

As this intriguingly cast action thriller got started, my hopes were stirred.  Onscreen was game-looking, gruff-sounding 72-year-old Jeff Bridges playing game, gruff Dan Chase, a former CIA agent who looked – 72 years old!  Nice, I thought.  No old geezer being made to appear like a sleek, 30-something killing machine.

Except shortly, that’s exactly what this series was asking me to believe.  Chase has been hiding incognito in upstate New York since he went rogue more than three decades ago in benighted Afghanistan, as the Russians were trying to vanquish the Mujahideen.

Now a widower, Chase is content to stay underground, with only two ferocious Rottweilers for company, sweethearts who also can kill on his command.  Old age needs its comforts.

When a CIA assassin sneaks into Chase’s home, his old spy instincts kick in and the years just seem to fall away.  He wrestles a man 40 years younger to the floor and coolly pumps bullets into his brain.

Now he has to flee.  He takes up residence in the guest house of a sad divorcee, Zoe (Amy Brenneman), and makes the mistake of confiding that Someone has “found” him and wants him dead.  He knows his enemies will shortly trace him to this location, so he kidnaps Zoe to keep her from talking.

Who is Dan running from?  It seems that back in Afghanistan he’d made common cause with a Mujahideen warlord to help him destroy a Russian encampment.  As an American, he had no business doing that. He’s also gotten into some personal entanglements that could have made him enemies.

John Lithgow as the FBI’s Harold Harper pursues a long-lost friend/foe in The Old Man

Dan’s chief handler in Afghanistan, Harold Harper (John Lithgow), has become an FBI assistant director for counterintelligence. And though Harper doesn’t know it, the smartest, most daring agent on his team is someone close to Dan.

Dan and that agent both understand that if Harper discovers their connection, and figures out that Dan has offed a CIA operative, Harper will have no choice but to bring his old comrade in. Not that he wants to. The two men share secrets from the old days they’d both like to keep buried.

Too many secrets.  Watchable as The Old Man is, its boxes within boxes, across seven crammed episodes, don’t open and close cleanly enough.  The escalating plot manipulations feel prolonged just to keep Bridges and Lithgow outmaneuvering each other as long as possible, and these two skilled actors certainly deliver.

Sometimes I wasn’t sure what they were snarling about, but they performed with such chilling grace that I never doubted that each man could kill or be kind. And turn from one impulse to the other on a dime.

Lithgow, age 76, has appeared in a variety of vehicles in movies, on stage and on TV.  His versatility is well established, so it’s no surprise that he can punch and counterpunch with Bridges in tightly written stretches of dialog.  Even when he’s just furrowing his brow, it feels like Shakespearean fretting.

The acting conundrum here is Bridges, who gives a fine performance in a role that demands mostly what we’ve seen him do before.   He makes Chase both sinister and charming from moment to moment, so we enjoy keeping an eye on him.

Yet pretty much everything he does here he’s done before.  He was a lovable if flawed country singer in Crazy Heart (2009), which won him a Best Actor Oscar, and a Texas Ranger master shootist in Hell or High Water (2016), leaving us in no doubt about Bridges’ cool or his professionalism.

But isn’t he ever invited to dig deeper? It’s not much of a stretch from those characters to Chase, though here he instantly switches from lethal to good-hearted with quicksilver ease.

His sharply honed talent is undeniable. But still richer work could be at rest, waiting to be awakened, inside Bridges.  He may not be interested in playing King Lear, but if Denzel Washington can play Macbeth, Bridges deserves a shot at another raging, near-mad monarch.

And why wouldn’t someone by now have given him the chance to play the flinty, towering actor-father James Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey into Night?  He could shake the rafters.

Bridges can take on more challenging roles than old men with kind hearts or stingingly bad attitudes.  At 72, he’s not so much an old actor as a still under-used one.

The Old Man has been picked up for Season 2.  Bridges, who will star again, is an executive producer on the show.