When the Coen brothers informed Jeff Bridges that they had written the cheerily stoned Dude character in The Big Lebowski specially for him, he wondered what in his filmography had inspired the movie-making siblings to see him in such a light. He had a point: before and after Lebowski, Bridges had never been much of a hippie, and he certainly doesn’t play one in series two of the agreeably gnarly thriller The Old Man (Disney+, from Wednesday).
His character, Dan Chase, doesn’t wear a dressing gown to lunch or have firm thoughts about rugs tying rooms together. He’s a former CIA assassin who did bad things for Uncle Sam half a lifetime ago in Afghanistan – and is prepared to take it to the limit all over again if it means making amends for past crimes.
Adapted from Thomas Perry’s 2017 bestseller, The Old Man ripples with an old-school noir energy. In series two it also becomes an enjoyable road movie as Bridges’ Dan teams up with John Lithgow’s FBI counter-intelligence director, Harold Harper, for a trek into Afghanistan.
They’re on the trail of Dan’s daughter Emily (Alia Shawkat), who turns out not to be his natural child but the offspring of an Afghan warlord, Faraz (Navid Negahban), who, back in the 1980s, had his wife stolen from under his nose by the American (a guilty secret Dan has lived with these long decades).
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Faraz now wants his daughter back in his life. So far his plan is going well. Having overcome the initial shock of her abduction, Emily proves amenable to connecting with the Afghan heritage her fake father denied her.
Bridges, who is now 74, had major health issues in the run-up to season two; in interviews he sounds appreciative to be still in the saddle. It started with a cancer diagnosis. Then, in the middle of chemotherapy, with his immune system compromised, he contracted Covid-19, a setback that, he said, “made the cancer look like nothing”.
But he got back on his feet and unleashes the full force of his curmudgeonly charisma in The Old Man. He is matched all the way by the excellent Lithgow. As an odd couple in a strange land, the pair are fantastic. It is true that, in the first few episodes, they don’t do much beyond bicker as they make their way across Afghanistan. Still, it’s heartening to see two actors in their 70s fronting a thriller where their age is not played as a punchline.
The Old Man also works well as a lament for Afghanistan under the Taliban, who are portrayed as stony-hearted revanchists (the Santa Clara mountains in California standing in for the war-torn Central Asian state). Where it fares less well is in selling Emily as a born-again victim of American imperialism, gratefully connecting with the land of her birth. Despite being brought back to Afghanistan against her will, she is more than open to connecting with the father she never knew – and helping him protect his multimillion-dollar lithium mine from the Taliban. It’s Stockholm syndrome prestige-TV-style, and it fails to convince.
Better by far are the scenes of Bridges and Lithgow trying to find a common cause after years of mistrust and enmity. They’re great buddy-picture material, and if the series built around their two-hander performance never quite achieves lift-off, their double act is worth the admission price. They come out swinging with a crotchety chemistry that never gets old.
