The Assassin Review: Mamma Mia! With a Sniper Rifle

For decades, the figure of the professional killer in pop culture has been a man of ageless stoicism or a young woman of lethal grace. The Assassin arrives with a premise that feels both startlingly obvious and long overdue: what happens when the hitwoman retires, enters middle age, and finds her quiet life on a Greek island violently interrupted?

The series introduces us to Julie (Keeley Hawes), whose days are now spent contending with local youths, not international syndicates. This sun-drenched tranquility is first fractured by the arrival of her estranged son, Edward (Freddie Highmore), who comes seeking answers about the father he’s never known. Before any domestic drama can properly unfold, Julie’s past detonates in the present.

A botched mission reveals she is no longer the hunter but the hunted, forcing her and the wholly unprepared Edward into a frantic, globetrotting fight for survival. The series immediately establishes itself as a high-octane chase, but its real subject is the strained mother-son relationship at its core, a clash of generational values set against a deafening symphony of gunfire.

A Subversive Family Portrait

The show’s most radical act, and its greatest contribution to the current television landscape, is its thorough deconstruction of the action hero archetype through its central duo. In Keeley Hawes’s Julie, we are given the “perimenopausal James Bond,” a label that barely scratches the surface of the character’s cultural significance.

This is not simply about placing an older actress in a traditionally male role; it is a full-throated refutation of the industry’s obsession with youth and its erasure of middle-aged women from narratives of power and physicality. Hawes portrays Julie with a magnificent blend of world-weary cynicism and honed, muscle-memory lethality. Her performance is textured with the small indignities and realities of her age; she is as concerned with her HRT patch as she is with her ammunition count.

This grounding makes her both more vulnerable and more formidable. She is utterly believable dispatching foes with firearms or, in one instance of brutal domestic improvisation, a cheese fork. Her physicality is not that of a weightless, ageless superhero but of a pragmatic, experienced fighter who knows her limits and uses her environment with terrifying efficiency.

This is a character whose frustrations with her body, her past, and her well-meaning but exasperating son are as central to the story as any gunfight, creating a figure who feels more authentic than a fleet of slick, untouchable spies.

Freddie Highmore’s Edward provides the perfect, necessary counterpoint, representing a form of masculinity rarely seen in the genre. As a cautious, vegan journalist, he embodies a younger generation’s sensibilities, acting as an anxious moral compass against his mother’s tidal wave of pragmatism and violence.

Highmore’s performance brilliantly captures the profound psychic whiplash of a man discovering his mother is not a headhunter in the corporate sense but a literal one. He is not a coward, but his approach to conflict is rooted in de-escalation and intellect, a stark contrast to Julie’s immediate recourse to force. His own secrets, which he keeps close to his chest, add a necessary layer to prevent him from becoming a simple comic foil and position him as a player in his own right.

Their relationship is the true engine of the show. The verbal sparring and dry, sarcastic banter are more than witty dialogue; they are the sound of two deeply disconnected eras and worldviews colliding. The series masterfully inverts the tired trope of the stoic, emotionally distant father and the son desperate for his approval.

Here, the mother is impulsive, emotionally blunt, and brutally frank, while the son pleads for caution, communication, and emotional clarity. This role reversal, and the potent chemistry between Hawes and Highmore, is where the show’s comedic and emotional power is most intensely concentrated, offering a portrait of family that is as dysfunctional as it is, in its own strange way, devoted.

Narrative Velocity in the Streaming Age

The Assassin operates at a breakneck speed, a clear and deliberate product of the streaming era it inhabits. The narrative hurtles from the sun-bleached shores of Greece to the stark landscapes of Albania and the confines of a Libyan prison, barely pausing for breath.

This propulsive energy is a hallmark of modern television designed for the binge-watch, a storytelling engine built to create a state of perpetual motion that keeps a viewer locked in for the next episode. It functions within the logic of the attention economy, where narrative stillness is seen as a risk.

The constant movement and escalating stakes are designed to prevent the viewer’s thumb from swiping to the next option on the home screen. The central plot, concerning who wants Julie dead and why, is layered with the secondary mystery of Edward’s paternity. Yet, this relentless pace comes with a significant cost.

The plot frequently and gleefully embraces the preposterous. The narrative is littered with moments that stretch credulity to its breaking point, from a professional assassin carrying a pregnancy test in her tactical suit during a mission to a sniper attack that conveniently eliminates an entire village of bystanders while leaving the main characters miraculously unscathed.

The ease with which they commandeer a billionaire’s yacht or the timely arrival of an old colleague on a jet ski are presented with a shrug, as if the show itself is aware of its own absurdity. This raises a critical question about this mode of contemporary storytelling: does the sheer velocity required to hold an audience’s attention in a saturated market inevitably sacrifice narrative logic?

In this case, the show’s speed often feels like a deliberate choice to outrun scrutiny, prioritizing constant stimulus over internal coherence. This can be thrilling, but it also prevents any real sense of danger or consequence from taking root.

When every scene operates at maximum intensity, the moments that should be genuinely climactic can lose their impact. The initial excitement of the premise is undeniable, but it struggles to maintain its grip as the tangled plot becomes more convoluted with each passing episode.

The Unstable Marriage of Violence and Wit

The series attempts a difficult and precarious tonal fusion, placing brutal, well-choreographed violence alongside a strain of quintessentially dry, British humor. The result is a show that can feel like a high-wire act performed without a net. One moment, Julie is engaged in a visceral, life-or-death struggle, her actions swift and merciless.

The next, she is embroiled in a petty argument with Edward about his dietary choices or comparing notes on middle-aged medications with another survivor while hiding from gunmen. At its best, this jarring juxtaposition creates a fresh and often hilarious experience, highlighting the profound absurdity of their situation.

The humor serves to domesticate the violence, grounding the extraordinary circumstances in mundane, relatable conflict. This approach makes the show’s world feel unique, a place where international espionage and familial squabbles occupy the same chaotic space.

The action itself is staged with a clear commitment to spectacle over realism. The credit for a “blood specialist” in the opening titles signals the show’s aesthetic intent: the violence is meant to be impactful and stylish, with strangely animated blood spatters that lend it an almost comic-book quality. Key sequences, like the opening flashback in Bulgaria and the chaotic sniper attack on the wedding, are designed for maximum visual flair rather than gritty authenticity.

This stylistic choice aligns with the show’s tongue-in-cheek feel, which places it in conversation with other contemporary spy thrillers that lean into absurdity. The comparison to “Mamma Mia! with a sniper rifle” is apt; the series combines the aspirational fantasy of a Mediterranean travelogue with the brutal mechanics of a genre film.

However, this marriage of tones is not always stable. The rapid shifts can occasionally feel jarring and emotionally dissonant, creating an unevenness that sometimes undermines the narrative stakes and leaves the viewer unsure of how to feel.

Collateral Characters in a Tangled Web

Beyond its magnetic central duo, The Assassin populates its world with a host of secondary players and parallel subplots, and it is here that the narrative structure shows the most strain. We are introduced to billionaire siblings Kayla and Ezra, who are connected to Edward, and their powerful, shadowy father, Aaron Cross. We also meet Luka, a resourceful Greek villager who gets swept up in the initial chaos.

The show struggles to make a compelling case for their deep inclusion. These characters often feel more like archetypes or plot devices than fully realized individuals—the dumb rich kid, the conflicted heiress, the salt-of-the-earth local. Their presence serves to complicate the narrative mechanics rather than enrich the emotional world of the show. They are chess pieces in a plot that feels increasingly overstuffed.

The same issue plagues the disparate story threads that unfold in parallel. The most significant of these is the grim tale of Jasper, an IT specialist enduring a brutal ordeal in a Libyan prison, and a separate thread involving a mysterious woman named Marie investigating Edward in London. Tonally, the gritty prison survival story feels as if it belongs to an entirely different, much darker series.

In a tighter narrative, these threads might add layers of depth and intrigue, slowly converging with the main story in a satisfying way. Here, they tend to overcomplicate an already dense plot, pulling focus from the far more engaging mother-son dynamic.

The show feels burdened by the modern convention of needing multiple, intertwining A, B, and C plots, a structure that can work in a longer series but feels cramped in a six-episode run. Their eventual intersection with the main action feels more obligatory and convenient than organic, a symptom of a show whose narrative ambition occasionally exceeds its grasp.

An Archetype Reconfigured

The most lasting impression of The Assassin is its intentional and successful reconfiguration of the hitwoman archetype. By placing an unapologetically middle-aged, menopausal woman at the center of its violent, chaotic world, the series makes a quiet but firm statement about who is allowed to occupy these narratives and command the screen.

It challenges both ageism and sexism in a single, confident stroke. The show suggests that a woman’s story does not end at forty; it can, instead, explode into an action movie. It grounds the extraordinary life of a killer in the very ordinary realities of family dysfunction, bodily change, and personal frustration, opening up new narrative possibilities for a whole demographic of actors and the characters they can portray.

The series itself is an entertaining, if flawed, machine. Its primary strengths—the electric interplay between its leads, its sharp and dark humor, and its culturally significant central concept—are considerable. These must be weighed against its weaknesses: a messy, often illogical plot that prioritizes speed over sense, and a supporting cast that feels more like narrative clutter than a necessary part of the story.

For viewers who prioritize a high-energy, stylish ride animated by a refreshing premise and stellar lead performances, the series delivers a satisfying shot of adrenaline. It is a witty, bloody, and important piece of television. Those who require narrative precision and deep emotional resonance, however, may find that while the show always fires, its aim is not always true.

Full Credits

Director: Lisa Mulcahy, Daniel Nettheim

Writers: Harry Williams, Jack Williams, Krissie Ducker, Hamish Wright, Selina Lim

Producers: Nige Watson

Executive Producers: Alex Mercer, Daisy Mount, Sarah Hammond, Harry Williams, Jack Williams, Keeley Hawes, Freddie Highmore, Hamish Wright

Cast: Keeley Hawes, Freddie Highmore, Gerald Kyd, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Devon Terrell, David Dencik, Alan Dale, Gina Gershon, Jack Davenport, Richard Dormer, Ali Fardi