Ten years between TV seasons is a veritable eternity, and to lure people back into its spy games, The Night Manager delivers a long-awaited follow-up which shifts networks (from AMC to Prime Video, via BBC One), changes directors (Georgi Banks-Davies, replacing Susanne Bier), and relocates from Egypt to Colombia.
Yet in every appreciable way, it fails to live up to its shiny reputation.
Mechanical and predictable, this six-part sequel (Jan. 11) sends Tom Hiddleston’s British intelligence officer on an overseas mission to thwart the nefarious activities of an arms dealer who’s a lot like his prior nemesis, doing almost nothing novel with its template save for coloring its action with a bit of out-of-left-field homoeroticism. Its every step foreseeable and marked by corny dialogue and de rigueur twists, it’s a failed bid to recapture the original’s Emmy-winning magic.
As before, The Night Manager is created and written by David Farr, who this time around has no John Le Carré novel to use as a guide—a state of affairs that’s conspicuously felt in its by-the-books machinations. In a brief prologue set four years after the events of season one, Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) joins his Foreign Office handler Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) in the Middle East as she identifies the body of wicked gun-runner Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie).
This seems to put their quest to bed, and six years after that, Pine is the head of a surveillance team called the Night Owls, which means that, technically speaking, the former soldier-turned-hotelier-turned-secret agent is still a night manager. Pine, a master of disguise, is doing this under the alias Alex Goodwin, and though Roper lives in his head, he’s as cool under pressure as ever, telling his therapist, “I’m the man who will not explode.”
Such an early admission should imply that Pine is, in fact, destined to blow a fuse, but The Night Manager imagines him as a preternaturally calm and composed quasi-007. Despite nicely filling out a designer suit and acting suave and tough in the tightest of spots, Hiddleston’s hero is a Bond-ian cardboard cutout, and any potential psychological scars quickly take a backseat to derring-do when he spots, at a gambling den he’s monitoring, a soldier for hire with ties to Roper.
Pine ignores orders and tracks this killer, who’s meeting with another British intelligence officer and, additionally, Mayra (Indira Varma), the chief of The River House that oversees the Night Owls. In the wake of a “shocking” death, Pine’s sleuthing leads him to Roxana Bolaños (Daisy Jones and the Six’s Camila Morrone), a Colombian shipping broker stationed in Miami who’s tangled up with a mysterious man whom Pine quickly deduces is Roper’s ruthless disciple.
This individual is Teddy Dos Santos (Babylon’s Diego Calva), a stock villain who, taking a cue from Roper, uses a charitable foundation (focused on rescuing kids from poverty and violence) as a cover for his illicit arms trade. During an unsanctioned operation, Pine eavesdrops on a conversation between Teddy and the aforementioned mercenary about a clandestine shipment—the first of two instances in which scoundrels blab about their plans in a hotel lobby for everyone and anyone to hear. When things take a tragic turn, Pine goes underground and, with the aid of his Night Owls partner Sally (Hayley Squires), sets about trying to take down Teddy, a wan proxy for his former foe.
The Night Manager eagerly sticks to what previously worked, with Pine assuming a different identity in order to infiltrate Teddy’s tight inner circle. That process, however, is laughably easy and unbelievable; all it takes is joining a Colombian tennis club and waiting five minutes for Teddy to immediately decide that they should be best friends.
The series goes through the espionage motions without a care for plausibility, underscoring its lack of seriousness, and the evening after they meet, Teddy is already inviting Pine to a charity gala and not so subtly hitting on him, even as he introduces him to Roxana, unaware that she and Pine have already met and are in tentative cahoots. From there, Pine strives to figure out the precise contents of the shipment arriving into a Colombian port by getting close to Teddy—a scheme that culminates with a sensual three-way dance between the protagonists that’s just about the height of unintentional hilarity.
What ensues is fast-paced, sketchy, and assembled from an endless array of genre components, including briefcases, codes, ledgers, offshore accounts, surveillance stakeouts, journals, photographs, druggings, money transfers, passports, shootouts, and swanky cars, hotels, homes, restaurants, and clothes. It’s a laundry list of things seen and done myriad times before, and director Banks-Davies stages it with bland glossiness and minimal suspense.
The Night Manager leaves nothing to the imagination, such that its characters’ emotions are writ large across their faces and then italicized by the hand-holding score. Not helping matters, Hiddleston has little chemistry with Morrone or Calva, both of whom smile, fume, and weep with over-the-top boldness. Colman and Noah Jupe—the latter as Roper’s abandoned son Danny, now attending boarding school—are merely cameo players in this conventional contest, making a few token appearances to tether the proceedings to its ancestor.
Everything is overwrought in The Night Manager, and yet Farr can’t make any of it electric, his tale a hodgepodge of clichés. Pine’s investigation eventually turns up a bombshell discovery, albeit one that won’t stun discerning viewers, who’ll by that juncture understand that the entire point of this endeavor is to rehash and, afterwards, to set up future seasons cut from a similar cloth.
No matter Hiddleston’s charm, the sweep and flair of the first season are sorely lacking in this second go-round. As it wends its way to a conclusion that’s quite obviously going to avoid a genuine resolution, the material loses steam at a rapid clip, its cat-and-mouse maneuvers transparent and its wannabe-debonair dialogue stilted.
While a third series entry has already been greenlit—and is necessitated by the finale’s cliffhanger—there’s little on display here that warrants continuing to check into this subpar spy affair.
