Zero Day, Netflix review - can ex-President Robert De Niro save the Land of the Free?

It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball. Without warning, the USA suffers a total blackout of power, communications and computer systems.

The resulting chaos in air, road and rail transport, not to mention medical facilities, causes thousands of casualties, and nobody has a clue how it happened.

This blackout only lasted a mere 60 seconds, but the perpetrators have sent out ominous messages that they can make it happen again at any time. In a climate of hair-tearing hysteria, President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett, possibly the ghost of the Kamala Harris presidency that never was) sets up a special investigating commission to unravel what happened, and she wants Mullen to be in charge of it. He’s reluctant at first, but a mixture of patriotism and a yearning to be back in charge of something persuades him to take it on.

Apart from anything else, Zero Day is a splendid showcase for Robert De Niro (now 81), who comes to the Mullen role fully armed with curmudgeonly cussedness and an implacable determination to do whatever it takes. He's also a firm believer in good old pen and paper, rather than touch screens and the cloud. His daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan, pictured above with Matthew Modine) is a congresswoman on a more liberal trajectory than her dear old dad, and she’s soon issuing declarations that the investigating commission’s remit is fascist (and pops is, presumably, literally Hitler). After all, the President has given it draconian powers of search and seizure with even habeas corpus under threat. This could be giving the Donald all sorts of ideas.

In fine paranoia-thriller style, Zero Day keeps us guessing with its array of potential perps and provocateurs. Initially it seems that our old friends the Russians are to blame, not least because a GRU agent from the Russian consulate in New York is seen running around pointing a gun at people. But no, it’s too obvious. When this guy gets splattered across the tarmac by a garbage truck, we sense that other actors are in play.

Quite a few of them, in fact, like the gang of hackers found massacred in Brooklyn. A cyber-assault on the American Homestead bank prompts the President to shut down all financial transactions across the USA, triggering riots and outrage, but this proves to be only another red herring. As he keeps digging and the facts start to unravel, Mullen finds the conspiracy creeping closer and closer to home, threatening most of the things he holds dear.

Writers Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt have peopled their landscape with recognisable types ripped from the headlines. Gaby Hoffman plays Monica Kidder, a Silicon Valley billionaire and tech-sis – a kind of Eleanor Musk, if you will – who seems to know a lot more than she’s letting on. Dan Downton Abbey Stevens lives it up as the shouty TV populist Evan Green (pictured above), purporting to take down the rich and privileged on behalf of the common man but mostly obsessed with bigging up himself. A bit of “enhanced interrogation” takes him down a peg or two.

There’s powerful support, too, from Joan Allen as Mullen’s wife Sheila, while Connie Britton sweeps imperiously across the stage as Mullen’s chief of staff Valerie Whitesell (the pair of them share a little bit of back-story baggage). Throw in Matthew Modine as the bumptious and self-regarding Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer, Jesse Plemons as Mullen’s Mr Fixit Roger Carlson and Bill Camp as wily CIA chief Jeremy Lasch and you’ve got a very handy little actors’ company indeed. They could have done with less of the portentous music to signal moments of high drama – this cast doesn’t really need too much assistance – but if you’re in the mood for a binge, Zero Day will do very nicely.

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