The latter starts tugging at old threads of a dark history that feels at once complicated and shallow. Chase goes on the run from an FBI team, headed by a fellow stubborn old man, Harold Harper (John Lithgow) and nosy CIA liaison Raymond Waters (EJ Bonilla).
Things take a turn about a quarter of the way into the first episode (like many overlong series these days, three of the four preview episodes stretched over an hour) when an intruder dislodges his sense of anonymity. Dialogue arrives in the form of concerned phone calls from his daughter, whose location and appearance are kept a mystery, and spectral dreams of his late wife, Abbey (Succession’s Hiam Abbass, again criminally underused), who died years earlier of a degenerative illness. Many of the early scenes, when Bridges’s Dan Chase is still alone and unbothered, are long, nearly wordless takes – the bucolic sound design emphasizes the ticking clock, wind chimes, his labored breathing – that rely on Bridges’s steady naturalism.
Much of the show’s success comes down to Bridges, who anchors a rickety character visibly battered by the past yet able to shapeshift in the present. I mostly enjoyed the four episodes made available for review, despite some prolonged, knuckle-smashing fight scenes that were well-simulated but draining. The seven-part limited series, developed by Jonathan E Steinberg and Robert Levine, is a better-than-it-should-be braid of male fantasies: hyper-competency in late age, the ability to protect loved ones from forces larger than they understand, having superior combat skills applied justly, proving people wrong and being ultimately right.