Dan Chase, the lead in FX's new drama The Old Man, is on the run. They're chasing him, do you see what they did there? — by various US government agencies, at least one deadly contractor, and international adversaries. He is an intelligent man, but his main antagonist is time: a past that catches up with him and a future that becomes more finite.
It's a role made for Jeff Bridges, one of those actors who was born to and into Hollywood stardom and has gracefully grown from golden boy to septuagenarian savant on movie screens across the country.
As a thriller, The Old Man doesn't always deliver. His internal logic is spotty and his backstory shallow. As a showcase for Bridges and John Lithgow, the rare actor almost able to match his indelible co-star role in another indelible role, The Old Man is far more satisfying, though audiences will yearn for a more direct interplay between the two perfect notes. drives and less of the genre filler that stretches three of the four episodes sent out to critics to over an hour.
The Old Man is an adaptation by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, who take great liberties with Thomas Perry's novel. At the start, Dan is a Vermont widower living with two very good dogs in quiet seclusion that concerns his unseen daughter, Emily. When a killer shows up at his house, it's instantly clear that Dan Chase is more than just your average old person with regular doctor appointments and fitful sleep. In the 1980s, Dan (Bill Heck, in flashbacks) was an intelligence agent in Afghanistan, and after decades in hiding, the consequences are coming, whether Dan deserves them or not.
The man following Dan is Harold Harper (Lithgow), a tenuous ally in the past, now an FBI hotshot in the latter stages of a decorated career, battling his own pain and caring for an intense protégé in Angela from Alia. Shawkat. Harold isn't sure he wants to catch Dan, but there may be stronger forces at play.
As the game of cat and mouse spreads across the country and their shared history, The Old Man (the title could apply to any of them) blurs the line between predator and prey, between hero and villain. , between the men Dan and Harold used to be and the men they have become. In some ways, it feels like a companion piece to Apple TV+'s Slow Horses or Amazon's Night Sky, dramas in which the familiar elements of the genre are updated through a focus on the maturity of the main characters. Eventually someone will finally adapt Don Winslow's The Winter of Frankie Machine, one of the best stories of its kind.
Much of the series' moral ambiguity isn't in Perry's fast-moving book, but it's sparse, especially when it comes to Dan's story. Steinberg and Levine have added timely references to the mujahideen and evil Russians. It's an improvement over the bland on-page money heist, but those elements aren't explored enough to play as anything more than a low-cost Homeland knockoff that consumes 10-15 minutes per episode. The changes made for the current story are more effective, especially the decision to transform Harper from a characterless suit into a well-matched contemporary struggling with her own need for reinvention at the end of his life.
If only the writers could have invented more opportunities for Lithgow and Bridges to go toe-to-toe with the series' brawny yet exposition-heavy dialogue. They share a couple of phone conversations at the premiere, and then it's long stretches of nothing. Keeping cat and mouse apart is a staple of the genre, but even The Fugitive gave Gerard a chance to say he didn't care about Kimble's innocence before letting them run parallel for most of the film.
Lithgow, in a role that combines his patented ability to appear simultaneously fatherly bureaucrat and looming threat, is mostly paired with a pleasantly understated Shawkat. Bridges has to draw courage from the scenes with Amy Brenneman as a divorcee who gets caught up in Dan's escapades for reasons that are strange and unexplained here, but are somehow so much better than in the book.
Bridges, gray-haired and robust at the same time, needs no one to play with, including the strong, if a little adrift, Brenneman. His gruff voice conveys intelligence and weariness.