The Assassin review — Keeley Hawes is a knockout as a ‘perimenopausal 007'

Times

25-07-2025

Can you ever truly pull off the comedy thriller? The comedy drama is everywhere these days, but that's easy. When you've run out of jokes you just go all serious for a bit (as a political sketch writer, believe me, I know that technique well). But in a full-on thriller, where plot and pace and mood are everything, how can a steady stream of gags not puncture the spell every single time?
The movie Saltburn was theoretically a comedy thriller. I loved it, but it's not funny. If you can't decide if you're trying to be funny or darkly thrilling, you can end up with a man shagging another man's freshly covered grave or doing even worse to his bath plug.
The Assassin, Prime Video's new six-part comedy thriller starring Keeley Hawes, is an education in how it should be done. It's an absolute cracker. The secret, we now know, is to serve the thrills and laughs one after another in very quick succession, not to try to blend them together.
It's to take a quick break from, say, an all-action, no expense spared, absolutely full-on massacre and have a son ask his blood-spattered, gun-toting mother: 'Are you really not going to tell me why you're some kind of perimenopausal James Bond?'
The simplicity of the premise only elevates it. Hawes's Julie, to the surprise of her son, a journalist, is a former 'hitwoman' drawn out of retirement for one last job. (It just doesn't sound right, does it, 'hitwoman', but I think that might be a joke too. The writers must be aware of the appropriate gender-neutral term for contract killer. It's right there in the title.) But there, you will not be shocked to learn, the simplicity stops as it gets lost in ever more interwoven webs of deceit.
The scenes in a hellhole of a Libyan prison are every bit as dark and unsettling and stomach-churningly violent as anything you'll find in, say, Zero Dark Thirty. There are dismembered fingers all over the place and, eventually, a phone that has to be repeatedly unlocked with a very literal thumb drive.
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And then, within seconds, you're watching a man built like the proverbial brick outhouse, powerless to take action against the almost octogenarian businessman who's slapping him repeatedly around the face, who also happens to be Jim Robinson from Neighbours (Alan Dale).
By the end of episode four of six, which is all that's been made available for preview, all we know is that the world suddenly changes any time anyone dares to say out loud the word 'chantaine', which pertains to a shocking secret that must be suppressed whatever the blood-stained cost. With just a third of the action to go, we still have no idea what chantaine is, although I personally am leaning very gently towards incest.
Another, less mysterious secret is that luxury saunas are still more dangerous than they look. It's strange how TV trends emerge, but barely a month after Mountainhead and centuries after the retirement of the iron maiden, the high-powered sauna has emerged as the torture instrument de jour for slightly stupid billionaires. In other recurring themes, Lisburn's own Richard Dormer, aka Gerry from Blue Lights and Norman Stoke in The Day of the Jackal, continues his late flourishing as a top-level criminal, and now appears to be hiding out in secret, dilapidated off-grid locations all over Europe.
What's arguably most intriguing about The Assassin is that there is an easy way to get hold of a flawless comedy thriller, one with all the whip-smart, antic charm of, say, Killing Eve or Daniel Craig's last Bond movie, No Time to Die, and that is to pay a lot of money to Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Which is precisely what Prime Video did, several years ago, yet it has produced The Assassin without her involvement.
If it feels Waller-Bridge-like, then it may be because it has been created by Two Brothers Productions, the two brothers being Harry and Jack Williams, who developed and produced Fleabag from Waller-Bridge's 2013 Edinburgh Fringe show. In The Assassin, they have yet another knockout triumph on their hands, and I can't wait for the final two episodes.
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I have, on this page, occasionally mourned the near death of the straight-up, straightforward sitcom. Comedy dramas and comedy thrillers are fine, but only in a pure comedy can the laughs truly run the show. It's a long time since the humble sitcom ruled the TV schedules. That the three Gavin and Stacey Christmas specials were spread over 16 years, and without much else in between them, only proves the point.
With comedy, it's always hardest to do it the supposedly easy way. What a treat, then, that the best new sitcom in years is back for a third series and as brilliant as ever. Here We Go, still being written by, and starring, the brilliant Tom Basden, and still starring the just as brilliant Alison Steadman, Katherine Parkinson and Jim Howick, is still regularly described as a 'sleeper hit'. Well all I can say is, 'Wake up, everybody! Wake up at once!' I truly envy anyone who has never seen Here We Go, never met its dysfunctional modern family and their boring life in suburbia, who can still take it all in from the beginning for the very first time in all of its chaotic, brilliant glory.
It's possible that it takes a while to get into, because there are quite a lot of characters, and it takes a while to appreciate that every one of them is perfect, that they are each holding up their own corner of a ingeniously constructed comedy crucible into which anything can be placed and will always come out hilarious.
Oh, the delight of knowing that absolutely everything you see, be it a smart door lock, a Lego Eiffel Tower or a Big Green Egg, or indeed two Big Green Eggs, are all Chekhov's guns, that all of them will go off, and all in more spectacularly disastrous ways than you've dared to imagine.
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Here We Go is a rarity in that its format, if it can be described in such a way, actually improves with age. Constant escalation is required. At the end of the last series, the Chekhov's gun actually was a gun, being waved about at a wedding, and rather too close to the cake. At the start of this series, among the first seeds to be planted — the first glimpse of chaos — is a can of pepper spray in the handbag of Gran Sue (Steadman). Oh, and none of them can get to a long-planned family outing to an escape room because they have all been locked in their house.
If all this sounds like it's at risk of jumping the shark, then absolutely not, that's the whole point. The shark was jumped before the first episode. Here We Go exists beyond the shark. There are seven new episodes and every one is a joy to be savoured.
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