TV review: Zero Day starring Robert De Niro is a proper pacy thriller

Robert De Niro as George Mullen in Episode 103 of Zero Day.

Cillian Murphy said he does some of his best acting when he’s saying nothing. The same could be said of Robert De Niro in Zero Day (Netflix). 

No small amount of camera time is spent roaming the craggy, stern decent face of his character, former president of the USA, George Mullen. 

It seems to be looking out, at Americans in particular, and asking, are you really OK with this?

At one level this six-part series feels like a bog-standard TV movie, where a former president is brought back to lead an investigation into a massive cyber attack on US transport infrastructure, causing thousands of deaths. 

There’s drone footage of New York and Washington, dodgy Russians and the obligatory fleet of black SUVs. 

Mullen is brought back to head up a commission that has been given extraordinary powers of arrest and detention, the kind of carry on you’d get in a fascist state. Sound familiar?

It’s made explicit in a scene where Mullen calms a cranky mob high on conspiracy theories, chiding them for being un-American. 

The call for a kinder America that was blown away by Trump in the last election feels out of touch.

This won’t take from your enjoyment of Zero Day. 

It’s nicely paced, with a hint of Homeland as Mullen calls in favours from an Israeli friend to unearth who really designed and launched a cyber attack that comes with a chilly warning this will happen again. 

Jesse Plemons is eye-catching as Mullen’s dodgy assistant. The dodgy Russian is convincingly dodgy and Russian and I liked the sub-plot about a mysterious woman who visited Mullen hours before the attack.

But this show has something that elevates it above airport-novel thriller. Mullen seems to be losing his mental faculties. We’re not told if it’s age-related dementia, but we are shown him struggling to recall phone-calls from his man in the CIA.

This is handled brilliantly at the end of the first episode, to the extent we’re as confused as Mullen as to what’s really going on. 

This could be a comment on Joe Biden’s mental fragility towards the end of his presidency; it’s also used here as a clever plot device. We hear it from inside Mullen’s head, so we’re discovering the truth at the same time as him.

That’s why De Niro’s face matters and he uses it here to great effect. The second episode doesn’t quite match the opener for twists and shocks, but Zero Day is a proper pacy thriller. Give it a watch.