‘Zero Day’ reviews: Critics call Robert De Niro thriller ‘an astonishing amount of fun’ — and also ‘deadly dull’
Robert De Niro headlines his first TV series on Netflix’s Zero Day, all six episodes of which are now streaming. But should you have zero doubts about checking it out?
As of Thursday morning, the political thriller has a score of 57 on Metacritic based on 16 reviews, putting it in the mixed or average range. On Rotten Tomatoes, it is rotten at 44 percent.
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Created by Eric Newman (Narcos), Noah Oppenheim (Jackie, NBC News), and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael S. Schmidt, Zero Day stars De Niro as President George Mullen, who is asked by current President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) to head an investigation into a cyberattack. The cast includes Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Connie Britton, Joan Allen, Bill Camp, Dan Stevens, Matthew Modine, and McKinley Belcher III. Lesli Linka Glatter (Mad Men, Homeland) directed all six episodes.
On Metacritic, four critics gave Zero Day a score of 80, its highest. “An astonishing amount of fun — firmly grounded by De Niro and his portrait of a good man struggling to do the right thing in a world that offers corruption at worst, and only compromise at best,” Lucy Mangan (The Guardian) writes. John Anderson (Wall Street Journal) says the story “becomes impossible to let go.”
But most critics are lower on the limited series, though they generally agree De Niro carries the show. “It has limited capacity to surprise, limited interest in provoking, limited ability to entertain,” Nick Hilton (The Independent) writes. “There are worse things in life than watching Robert De Niro’s face for six episodes, but he is let down by material that turns the tortured role of president into a caricature of American earnestness.” Marianne Levy (The i Paper) says, “The series hangs on De Niro’s star power, but he doesn’t have that much to do.”
Zero Day has four negative reviews, including from Newsday‘s Verne Gay, who says the premise is an “interesting idea,” but the show is “otherwise deadly dull.”
“Wastes an undeniably spectacular cast on a fundamentally silly and unrealistic story that badly wants to be taken as serious and realistic,” Daniel Fienberg (The Hollywood Reporter) says. “The truth is that the cast is too good for Zero Day not to be watchable, but its self-congratulatory conviction that it’s far smarter than it actually is makes it hard to embrace on more than a speculative ‘What are all these people doing here?’ level.”
All six episodes of Zero Day are now streaming on Netflix.
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