‘The Night Manager’ Review: Tom Hiddleston’s Brooding Spy Moves to Amazon for a Second Season That Sizzles After a Sluggish Start | Retrui News | Retrui
When he originally adapted John le Carré’s The Night Manager for BBC One and AMC, David Farr reshaped a key narrative thread from the 1993 novel involving the covert arming of Colombian drug cartels in order to keep the action centered primarily in the Middle East. Presumably, that felt like a more geographically timely approach.
A cerebral thriller boosted by the performances from Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, The Night Manager was a huge hit in the UK and a major awards player in the States, but the six-episode series’ March 2016 finale felt generally resolved. AMC moved back in the le Carré catalogue to The Little Drummer Girl, another contained six-parter that I actually preferred for Florence Pugh’s star turn and the flashy direction from Park Chan-wook, though it was less of a smash.
The Night Manager
The Bottom Line Gets good once it stops living in the past.
Airdate: Sunday, January 11 (Amazon) Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Diego Calva, Camila Morrone, Hayley Squires, Paul Chahidi, Indira Varma, Olivia Colman Creator: David Farr Director: Georgi Banks-Davies
The BBC announced in 2024 that it was bringing The Night Manager back, with Amazon now serving as domestic distributor, but it didn’t seem like there was much urgency, even when plot descriptions suggested that Farr was reinstating the Colombian locations from the book.
As recently as six months ago, the storyline of a Western superpower fronting economically motivated regime change in South America sounded more reflective — nods to American interventions in Nicaragua or Panama in the ’80s — than prescient. Heck, even last week when season two of The Night Manager premiered in the UK, the story was still tantalizingly speculative.
But timing is everything, and suddenly, with the U.S. launching military operations in Venezuela and barely even denying the importance of natural resources as motivation, Amazon is sitting on its savviest piece of geopolitical fiction since that clip of John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan talking about the strategic importance of Venezuela went viral.
It’s still hard to deny that Farr is wildly over-relying on viewer investment in characters and storylines from a 10-year-old limited series. But with ample clumsy exposition to provide a refresher, the resurrection of has gone from solidly entertaining to grippingly immediate practically overnight.
The new series — ordered with a third installment, so don’t expect closure — begins with Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine, a British intelligent agent plucked from the desk of a Swiss hotel, and handler Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) identifying the body of nefariously charismatic arms dealer Richard Roper (Laurie). All I’ll say here, keeping spoilers to a minimum, is “It’s not so simple” and “There’s a reason Amazon is doing a three-episode launch for the season.”
In the present day, nine years after the original finale, Pine is working under the name “Alex Goodwin” and leading an intelligence team called the Night Owls. They are, as people repeatedly observe, in surveillance and not operations, which is just the way Pine wants it. The only people who know his previous identity are Angela, retired to a villa somewhere, and Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge), a good man and therefore not long for this morally compromised world. Certainly Pine’s new boss, Indira Varma’s Mayra Cavendish, doesn’t know and isn’t overburdened with morality.
So the Night Owls are for surveillance and not operations, at least until Pine spots a familiar face, somebody with ties to Roper. That familiar face leads to an off-the-book operation, which leads to tragedy and then, in turn, leads Pine to Colombia and nefariously charismatic arms dealer Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), whose balancing of black market munitions and forward-looking charitable endeavors is right out of the Richard Roper playbook.
Soon, Pine and Sally (Hayley Squires), a fellow Night Owl whose skillset is best defined as “computer,” are in Colombia. The only person they can trust back at The River House is the genial Basil (the superb Paul Chahidi). Pine is trying to infiltrate Teddy’s operation with the help of the reluctant Roxana (Camila Morrone), a Colombian-born, Miami-raised businesswoman functionally taking the place of Elizabeth Debicki’s Jed from the first season.
You don’t need to remember much about Jed to watch the second season of The Night Manager, nor do you really need to remember much about what Angela or Rex had to do with bringing Roper down. It helps to remember the bond forged between Pine and Roper initially, but there’s a stretch at the beginning of the season during which nearly every other line of dialogue is “This reminds me of what Richard Roper used to do” — so at the very least you need to know they’re not talking about the guy who used to have a television show with Roger Ebert.
Because of all the obsessing over a 10-year-old show, the first 2.5 episodes of the new season of The Night Manager are a hair sluggish; even when those episodes pick up the pace, it’s usually to introduce a bunch of new or returning characters just to kill them off, basically to make the point that people around Jonathan Pine die.
Pine is, on the page and in the series adaptation, a great and quintessentially le Carré-ian character, selflessly dedicated to his job and his country, but simultaneously too narcissistic (or myopic, I suppose) to notice or care that people he cares about keep suffering. He’s exactly the sort of internally conflicted mess you’d expect for a guy who, over the course of six episodes here, uses at least four different names. Then again, in the world of The Night Manager, if you only have one name, you’re an overly simplistic person.
The thing that’s so great about Hiddleston’s performance is that it’s almost a clean inversion of the actor’s take on Loki, a villain so pathologically likable that Marvel keeps bringing him back to play the same beats repeatedly. Jonathan Pine is the hero, a character everybody in the series is irresistibly attracted to, but Hiddleston doesn’t care if you like him.
Beyond the espionage stuff and the increasingly vital reminder of what happens when powerful countries attempt to carve the globe up into zones of economic exploitation, what Farr does best is build a show around the relationships everybody has with Pine, steering the actors toward intriguing extremes.
In the first season, the fatherly devotion Roper grew to feel for Pine was what made Laurie’s sense of betrayal so raw, just as it tied into the bond that grew between Pine and Roper’s actual son Danny (Noah Jupe), who appears a couple of times in season two. It’s a safe assumption that Morrone’s Roxana is going to fall for Pine, but it isn’t that simple, in part because Roxana is badly underwritten and in part because Morrone is much better when she plays the character’s silent uncertainty than when she speaks. There’s some heat between Pine and Roxana, but much more between Pine and Calva, a flirtation the show acknowledges in one scene and insinuates throughout (some credit here, I’m assuming, to series director Georgi Banks-Davies, whose credits include Kaos and I Hate Suzy). Even Sally (Squires is my favorite addition to the cast) probably couldn’t articulate what she feels for Pine — just that she’s putting her life in jeopardy for him.
Everything in the season gets better in the second half — especially Calva, who initially comes across as a hunky-but-wan Roper substitute but eventually turns that apparent failing into the arc of a comprehensibly vulnerable performance. From the cast, only the wasting of Colman and Varma feels irritating.
Also growing more confident is Banks-Davies, stepping in for Susanne Bier, who won an Emmy for the first season. The season’s international locations, which include London, Spain and Colombia, start off just as an excuse for promotional hotel porn, but the second half of the season unfurls several memorable suspense set pieces and lets the settings come to life. I’ll allow viewers with a more attuned ear for Spanish accents and dialects chime in on the series’ authenticity from an ensemble in which very few of the main Colombian characters are played by Colombian actors.
A reminder again that The Night Manager, in addition to now being merely “inspired by” le Carré’s book, is at this point an ongoing series, one that gets most exciting when it finally stops referencing the first season and starts doing something with its connections. Hiddleston alone would be reason to watch, though, and I can’t help but wonder if Farr might have been better off forging a wholly new adventure with modern resonance. Counting on Donald Trump to give your show a boost is a questionable strategy.