TNT’s Iraq War Drama ‘High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam’ Is Dull and Deeply Disturbing: TV Review
Twenty-three years after the United States invaded Iraq, the American public now knows that despite his horrific reign and brutal dictatorship, Saddam Hussein never had any weapons of mass destruction. Based on former CIA analyst John Nixon’s 2016 memoir “Debriefing the President,” and adapted for television by Daniel Stiepleman and Jonathan Wakeham, TNT’s limited series, “High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam,” reflects on the horrors of the Iraq War. It also depicts the capture and execution of Hussein and the failed rationale behind the costly conflict, which is now seen as a blight on American history. Tedious and violent, the most intriguing aspects of the show — Nixon’s interrogations of the deposed president — are bogged down by endless war montages and clumsy dialogue, seemingly ripped from lengthy intelligence briefings.
“High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam” opens on March 17, 2003. John Nixon (a terribly miscast Joel Kinnaman) bikes through the streets of Washington, D.C. In a voiceover, John recounts President George H.W. Bush’s conflicts with Iran and President George W. Bush’s (Paul Ryan) choice to follow in his father’s footsteps and invade Iraq in an attempt to find President Saddam Hussein’s (a fantastic Waleed Zuaiter) so-called weapons of mass destruction and take over the region.
Two years after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Washington is quiet, but across the globe, Baghdad is in turmoil. Using real-life archival war footage and press briefings from the Bush administration, the eight-episode series showcases the chaotic invasion, the deaths of countless Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers, as well as the eventual capture and deaths of Saddam’s sons. However, months into the war, Hussein remains at large. “High Value Target” shows an increasingly chaotic and frustrated Central Intelligence Agency chasing unfounded leads. Though John, who has studied Hussein for decades, is adamant that his colleagues are barking up the wrong tree, his pleas to CIA higher-ups, Angela Jenkins (Talia Balsam) and Richard Stillwell (Matthew Wolf), are disregarded, largely because of his condescending nature and lack of field experience.
As the death toll climbs, John finally convinces the dysfunctional agency to let him follow his colleagues, Polly Stevens (Lena Góra) and Jerry Munro (Ewan Miller), into the Middle Eastern country. Despite feeling like he understands Hussein and has a better understanding of Iraqi culture than his Western counterparts, John is grossly ill-prepared to be dropped in a war zone. From encounters with terrorized women and children and encountering bombs and bazookas, John inadvertently finds himself on Operation Red Dawn, where the deposed Iraqi president is finally found and captured in an underground tunnel on a farm.
Across eight episodes, splicing between Washington, where John’s father, Charles (Tom Berenger), and wife Rebecca (Rebecca Night) await news, and the streets and military bases of Baghdad, “High Value Target” showcases an exhausting, ill-fated conflict. The show’s most riveting moments come from John’s encounters with Hussein, who is enigmatic and charming in one breath and sinister and unnerving in another. Going against protocol during their interrogations, John quickly realizes Hussein is speaking truthfully about his lack of weapons, and he begins to understand the West should actually be focused on Iran. However, getting the Bush administration to buy into these theories is much more challenging than John anticipates.
A highly immersive series, depicting the atrocities of Abu Ghraib prison where prisoners were beaten and tortured, as well as the immense cost of life under Hussein’s brutal regime, the show illustrates the daily circumstances for Iraqis that remain unimaginable to many Americans, even today. “High Value Target” thrives in the scenes between John, the former president and Samir (Dar Salim), John’s translator, who lost countless family members due to Hussein’s systematic state terror.
Unfortunately, these scenes are sporadic. The rest of “High Value Target” is a relentless (though rightful) condemnation of an administration that tried to posture its way into justifying a near-decade-long war, but failed in the end. When it’s all said and done, while it is important that Nixon told his story and the truth about what happened in Iraq, reimagining it as entertainment not only feels exploitative but futile for a country currently coming apart at the seams.
The first two episodes of “High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam” debut Sept. 13 on TNT, with the remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays and Mondays.
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