The Assassin review – will anybody save Keeley Hawes from this unbearably pathetic boy?

The Guardian · Jack Seale · 2026-11-06 08:01 UTC

The star is excellent in her return as a midlife assassin. But her whiny son is so annoying, the drama disintegrates into a soggy spy sitcom – he might just have killed the whole show

So there’s an assassin, right? Except, it’s not just AN assassin, it’s THE assassin. The world’s top assassin. Going round doing the most elite assassinations you can think of, being paid millions to kill super-dangerous people. Right? OK, But … it’s a woman – no, not like in Killing Eve. Well, OK, it is quite a lot like Killing Eve but wait: it’s not just a woman, it’s a sarcastic middle-aged British woman who hasn’t got time for anyone’s shit, And she’s got a difficult relationship with her adult son who doesn’t know she’s a killer! Boom!

One day a few years ago, prolific TV thriller writers Harry and Jack Williams (since The Missing in 2014 they’ve created Rellik, The Widow, Liar, Baptiste, Angela Black, Boat Story and The Tourist) pitched something like the above in a meeting with Prime Video, and walked out of the room with a big bag of money and a commission for another of their slick, twisty dramas. With Keeley Hawes as sardonic mercenary Julie Green and Freddie Highmore as her wan, bookish journalist son Edward, the premise of The Assassin just about survived a chaotic first season that benefited from placing its two leads inside a labyrinthine conspiracy.

In brief: Edward, who during an investigation into a dodgy mining company had fallen in love with the CEO’s daughter Kayla (Shalom Brune-Franklin), made a rare visit to his mum Julie’s Greek-island hideout, during which gunmen attacked her. Fleeing with Edward, Julie recognised Kayla as the person she had recently been hired to kill, but instead of carrying out the hit, she hunted the people who wanted her and Kayla dead. One foiled blackmail plot and a lot of MacGuffins later, it was revealed that Julie is not Edward’s biological mother – she picked him up as a baby 30 years ago after being sent to kill his father, and raised him as her own.

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