Robert De Niro is commanding in slick Netflix thriller Zero Day

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It’s been a long time since Robert De Niro stopped saying no to bad parts. But while the star has appeared in many kinds of film, from The Godfather Part II to Dirty Grandpa, the 81-year-old has largely resisted the call of the small screen.

So a leading TV role for one of our greatest living actors should feel like a significant occasion. Yet Zero Day is fairly standard Netflix fare. The six-part series follows the immediate aftermath of a deadly cyber attack on the US. The disaster is uncomfortably plausible but the show is more guided by the conventions of political thrillers than the current political landscape. Those looking for another slick drama set in the corridors of power will be sated; those hoping for a more rigorous interrogation of how that power might be used and abused in today’s America will find it lacking potency.

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De Niro commits to his role, bringing the requisite solemnity to an ex-president who returns to serve his country in a moment of crisis. Having stood down from office after one term following a family bereavement, George Mullen is busy with his memoirs when a minute-long tech outage wreaks havoc across America. Thousands are killed in horrific accidents; the rest of the nation is left on edge by an ominous message sent to every phone warning: “this will happen again”. 

Faced with an unknown threat and a tide of public panic, the incumbent president Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) turns to a trusted, upstanding figure and asks Mullen to head up a “special investigatory commission” to identify those responsible. As its chief, he would be granted unprecedented licence to surveil, arrest and interrogate citizens. His wife Sheila (Joan Allen), a judge, calls the committee “the single biggest affront to civil liberties” in history. His daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), a headstrong congresswoman, deems it “fascist”. For Mullen, however, it’s a matter of duty.

What follows is a twisting search that leads Mullen to question his convictions, doubt his judgments and eventually abdicate his moral principles. While he considers whether to strip the rights of individual Americans in the name of broader US security, his aide Roger (Jesse Plemons) is blackmailed by shady characters who seek to undermine the commission.

The show builds intrigue and suspense but keeps things wilfully vague. Fears about Russian interference, CIA over-reach, “hacktivism”, market manipulation and conspiracy media all appear in the story yet there is little specificity in how these themes are broached. And when real contexts are addressed it is often done clunkily, with lines such as “Remember Iraq?”

A starchy script that finds little space for naturalism or wit doesn’t always play to the strengths of a stellar ensemble. De Niro, however, transcends the writing with a quietly internalised yet commanding performance. The rookie might just make a name for himself in TV yet.

★★★☆☆

On Netflix now