An enjoyable new Ageing Dad drama: Disney+’s The Old Man reviewed

We men all think we’ve still got it, even when we’re well past 50 and young women look straight through us and every time we get up or sit down or lift something off a shelf we sigh or grunt with the effort. But sure, if push came to shove and we had to defend our loved ones, we’d definitely be able to fight off our attackers with our bare hands, no problem. It’s for people like us that The Old Man was created.

It belongs to that venerable tradition of Ageing Dad movies which stretches from Taken (featuring Liam Neeson and his particular set of skills) through to James Bond (Daniel Craig is now 54) and the Mission Impossible series (Tom Cruise is now 60). This one features Jeff Bridges who is even older – 72 – as Dan Chase, a long-retired CIA operative whose deep cover has been blown and whose past has come back to haunt him.

The premise is slightly absurd. At the beginning, we meet Chase in his remote, off-grid cabin, coughing and wheezing, unable to sleep properly, constantly having to get up in the night for yet another pee. Yet somehow, we are invited to believe, this ageing cronk has retained the strength and agility to go mano a mano with ruthlessly efficient assassins less than half his age and still emerge triumphant. Mind you, to be fair, he does have a pair of very well-trained rottweilers that answer to commands in German, that are really good at killing baddies, and that I hope don’t get killed because that would be sad.

Bridges, to his credit, makes all this plausible. Yes, he’s white-haired and decrepit. But he’s also handsome enough to be able to charm into bed Zoe (Amy Brenneman), an initially sceptical, attractive middle-aged divorcee whom he meets while on the run; limber and buff enough to strangle, kick and shoot his way out of trouble; and skilled enough to take out pesky drones with his sniper rifle. It ought to be comical, but he really does carry it off.

I’m not convinced by the MacGuffin, which looks like the purest drivel, and seems to involve something that happened in Afghanistan during the Russian occupation in the 1980s, and the ludicrous notion that 40 years on an Afghan warlord can command the services of the CIA and the FBI. But I think the key is to ignore those bits – I’m sure, by the end, the reveal will be as tortured and convoluted as the end of a Scooby-Doo episode – and focus on the core drama which is, essentially, ‘lone hero who can trust no one because everyone is out to get him’.

I like this genre. (Three Days of the Condor is, for me, the benchmark.) But whereas at film length there’s no room for flab, in an extended TV series you inevitably have to suffer a bit of padding. For example, there are too many moments where Zoe whines, like the lonely divorcee she is, about her ex-husband, and where we have to be reminded for character-development purposes that this couple is no longer in the first flush of youth. On their first date they wrily compare notes, for example, on all the medicaments they are taking. Yes, it’s quite charming and may provoke nods of amused recognition from its target audience. At the same time, you’re thinking – I was anyway – ‘Yeah, yeah. We get the point. And frankly we don’t care about this woman’s history or interior life. Her job is to be Reluctant Female Companion (like the woman handcuffed to Richard Hannay in one of the 39 Steps adaptations, or, indeed, like Faye Dunaway in Condor). She’s just a plot ancillary, so stop trying to persuade us otherwise.’

There’s also – again, presumably, to appease all those wives having to sit there enduring their husbands’ wish-fulfilment fantasies played out on screen – Chase’s daughter, Emily. Her identity at first is a mystery. All we know is that she is Chase’s most intimate confidante because he’s always on his mobile phone to her. Really? Isn’t it Operations Security 101 that when you’re on the run, pursued by everything the authorities have to throw at you, the biggest chink in your armour is electronic communications? Surely they must have taught this at Langley, even when Chase was training there in the 1970s? Rather too much disbelief suspension required here, I think.

Don’t let any of this put you off, though. It’s enjoyable stuff, full of hair-breadth ’scapes, and the icing on the cake is John Lithgow as Chase’s old buddy-turned-nemesis Harold Harper, who is the FBI boss in charge of hunting him down. Harper is torn between helping his old friend escape and disappear and bumping him off because he’s a damned nuisance with awkward secrets to spill. Lithgow is perfect casting too: he’s implacable, no doubt deeply compromised and you want him to fail. But at the same time you love him because he’s that zany, sweet, mad-professor guy who was so funny in 3rd Rock from the Sun.