Manhunt review: Apple TV Plus’ conspiracy thriller is dead on arrival
The Crown's Tobias Menzies stars in this facile take on the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination
TV Reviews Manhunt
April 14, 1865, is inarguably one of the most fateful dates in U.S. history. That’s the day President Abraham Lincoln attended a performance of Our American Cousin with his wife, Mary. Midway through the show, John Wilkes Booth fatally shot the President, hopped on stage, yelled the infamous line “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants”), and hobbled out of the theater. Apple TV+’s miniseries Manhunt, which premieres March 15, traces the fallout of Lincoln’s assassination, all the while wanting to give viewers a comprehensive portrait of the political unrest that teed up Booth’s actions—and that of those who were left to pick up the pieces of a Union in mourning and in tatters.
The first episode of Manhunt rightly focuses on the events at Ford’s Theater in D.C. For anyone who’s ever wanted to see Booth (Anthony Boyle) pick up his mail at the theater, fret over the last seconds before he fired a shot into Lincoln’s head, and even how he fled on horseback soon thereafter, this TV adaptation of James L. Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase For Lincoln’s Killer delivers. Only, the miniseries refuses to merely tell that tale—or to tell it in any kind of chronological order. The show haphazardly scrambles its timeline so much that increasingly necessary title cards like “30 minutes before the assassination” begin littering the screen at the start of every scene. Similarly, helpful ones like “Booth’s hotel room” and “Pennsylvania, a free state” eventually also end up suggesting that, narratively at least, Manhunt will require quite intrusive handholding—which becomes all the more distracting when no title card arrives and you’re left wondering why this one setting, why this one timeframe needs no geographic or chronological marker.
The shuffling back and forth is designed so that we follow Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies) in his attempts to wrangle Booth to justice. We also get a broader picture of the political turmoil that had immediately (and not so immediately) preceded Lincoln’s assassination. It offers Manhunt a chance to stage many a strategic meeting with Lincoln (Hamish Linklater) about slavery, the Union, Reconstruction, and the like—all in the months leading up to that fateful evening at the theater. The Union was at a precarious moment when Lincoln was killed (a night when two of his cabinet members were targeted as well). And Manhunt aims to show how Stanton’s search for Booth can’t be disentangled from the political maneuvering that took place in Washington (and the South).
This results in the show feeling intentionally fragmented. When it focuses on Boyle’s Booth, Manhunt is quite captivating. Here is a portrait of vanity and glory, of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. In this telling, Booth cannot see beyond the infamy he’s searching for in wanting to become a symbol of a resistance that may have been more splintered than he first imagined. His delusions of grandeur are neatly juxtaposed with the political chaos he unleashed. Boyle does a careful job giving textured complexity to a pathetic grandstander, a man who was too high on Shakespeare and Poe to see himself as anything but a hero of a country betrayed by Lincoln and his ilk.
Similarly, Menzies handles himself well enough as a Lincoln supporter who takes it upon himself to carry on his legacy as best he can—especially once his successor begins undoing much of what the president had hoped to accomplish to better usher in Reconstruction. All but unable to delegate anything to anyone working for him (including his own son), Stanton’s doggedness ends up feeling like an earmarked character trait constantly flagged by the show to better explain why he’s the focus of so much of this story. Such zeal is what eventually leads him to track down George Sanders, a self-described titan of U.S. industry who may have had some involvement in the Lincoln plot and yet who wears such suspicions with impunity. In one of the show’s most laughably jaw-dropping scenes, Stanton witnesses Sanders waving a gun at him: “I could fire this in Manhattan in broad daylight and nothing would happen to me,” he says, a line of dialogue that all too bluntly yanks us out of the late 19th century and forces us to have flashbacks to the 2016 election—and the 2020 one as well.
But if there is one element of Manhunt that best encapsulates why this handsomely mounted and often thrilling miniseries falters, it is Linklater’s portrayal of Lincoln. This was always going to be a tricky performance, especially as it is his absence which is supposed to drive the very plot of the show: In history and in specific moments in the show, it is the vacuum he created which fuels the many plots of Manhunt. But in insisting on peppering all too convenient flashbacks on any given episode, Manhunt makes Linklater’s Abe a continued presence throughout. And in many ways, the actor’s committed take on this oft-impersonated president is quite spot on. The makeup (and that beard) may be a tad distracting but you can’t deny that Linklater is trying to give you LINCOLN in bold capital letters, with all the oratory affectations you’d expect. It’s an interpretation more fitting for a taped PBS Great Performances broadcast than for a prestige take on Reconstruction-era America.
That leaves the actor in a bit of an island given that no one else around him is doing anything remotely similar. Not Lili Taylor, who plays Mary, his wife. Not Brandon Flynn, who plays Stanton’s son. And not even the likes of Patton Oswalt and Matt Walsh, who both leave their comedic beats behind here to better ground their respective characters (investigator Lafayette Baker, who helped Stanton in his search, and Samuel Mudd, the doctor who aided and harbored Booth). Menzies and Boyle similarly anchor their characters in a naturalistic tenor, with no fanciful accents or affectations. And so, even as he’s being historically accurate to what we know of the 16th president, it’s outright jarring when Linklater is onscreen. Such lack of modulation across performances belies the very fractured sensibility that runs all through Manhunt.
At once wanting to be a light-footed conspiracy thriller about the titular search for Booth and a story of political intrigue contemporary audiences are encouraged to see as all too timely in a post-January 6th world, Manhunt fails to cohesively bring its many thematic and narrative strands together. This is historical fiction at its most facile, too self-righteous to be persuasive about the historical parallels it’s trying to illustrate and too listless to make watching it feel like little more than required AP History homework.
Manhunt premieres March 15 on AppleTV+
35 Comments
Oh for FFS, why must everything be told in a non-linear fashion? It’s my big frustration with Feud this season. It keeps cutting back and forth, and I have no damn idea what timeframe we’re in. If ever there was a story that could be told in a straight fashion, it’s the hunt for Lincoln’s killer. It’s a terrific story, and doesn’t need any timeline pettifoggery.
The timeline shifting in this season of Feud is made even more confusing because Capote hardly changes, physically. As a commenter here (I think) pointed out, he was “a 31-year-old twink” when he first met the Paleys, yet in those scenes he’s still the same balding, middle-aged, paunchy writer who appears in the mid-1970s scenes.
Yes! It was totally unclear to me when he meets the Paley’s, because as you note he looks much older than he’s supposed to be at that point. Capote was always a very youthful looking person. The drugs and alcohol take a drastic toll on him, and we don’t really see that.
I didn’t think Westworld was a great show, but I thought it pretty cleverly used the fact that the hosts don’t age to hide when certain scenes took place.
One of the many reasons Battlestar Galactica was a deeply irritating show. (That and the obnoxious characters, the gibberish plot, the shaky camera work…)
One thing I liked about 24 was that the premise ensured a linear narrative the whole way(except for one flashback in the season one finale).
“I could fire this in Manhattan in broad daylight and nothing would happen to me.”are you fucking kidding me.
It was a perfect telegraph!
If the Border States doesn’t pay there dues I’ll let the Confederacy do as they please.
He went up to me, and with tears in his eyes he thanked me for saving slavery!
Let me see if I understand this: Tobias Menzies (pictured up top) is playing this guy?
Maybe he is supposed to be evil mirror universe Stanton?
I mean, I guess you’d know, right?
Yes
The beard was his trademark. The guy in Lincoln nailed it.
Bruce McGill! I agree
Man, I’m still not used to the digital cleanup work on old photographs. I swear that you used to not be able to see individual strands of hair on historical beards. Look how clear that shit is! You can see his pockmarks.
This is a mini-series, not a movie? Any idea how many episodes? And do they all drop at once or weekly? These are details that should be in a review like this.
Manhunt is one of my favorite historical books, written in a way that would make a great movie or TV show, so I had high hopes for this. I’ll judge for myself because….AVClub.
Even worse: nü AV Club.
I’m all in for the same reason. I don’t read much non-fiction, but I could not put Manhunt down when I read it almost 15 years ago. Just as long as they include the part where the guy who killed JWB self-castrates, holds the Kansas House of Representatives hostage at gunpoint, goes to live in a hole, and then disappears never to be heard from again. He deserves at least half an episode.
Also, I’ve read basically the diametric opposite of this review on another site, so it seems like it’s pretty subjective. Granted, maybe that one was biased for one reason or another. Or maybe this one is. Most likely, it’s just the kind of thing that’s going to generate strong responses either way.
I love Patton Oswalt but him as Lafayette C Baker is a little odd
That’s a shame, Anthony Boyle is doing an amazing job on Masters of the Air and I was hoping this would also be great. Pity.Also I second this notion that going out of order chronology needs to stop. I assume this is Oppenheimers doing, which worked for that movie but not everything needs to be done like this!!!
Pulp Fiction was on SBS last night, and since it had been years since I last saw it, I made myself a fuck-off huge steak and Diane sauce and a baked potato and watched it. I think it’s genius is that it’s a non-linear, intercut narrative, but it’s still reasonably easy to follow – it all makes sense, even though there aren’t that many overt cues as to where (well, when) you are in the timeline.
Oh Pulp Fiction crushes it effortlessly but most people aren’t Tarantino in there prime and a historical event is harder to pull off like this then just fiction.
True, and it helps that Pulp Fiction is more an anthology, I suppose, than flashbacks for the one story. They’re fairly self-contained – but still, it’s easy to follow.There’s some great show-don’t-tell bits, like Mia being in Butch’s dressing room with Marsellus, to let you know that she survived the OD, and Butch getting his dive orders Marsellus when Vincent and Jules turn up in shorts and T-shirts, to let you know that that’s before the fight, so the continuity (such as it is) isn’t ruined when Vincent gets his tart popped in the apartment. What’s annoying is more like in a show like this: here’s a flashback, featuring all the same characters, to a bit before when there’s no real cues, and suddenly it’s like “Wait, why’s he talking to her? I thought they hated each other? Did she come back from Japan alread- ooooooh, this must a flashback.” It got a little confusing with Monsieur Spade sometimes, but you could usually tell by the cars, and, occasionally, clothes. Mad Men used clothes a lot – they went back to those godawful American Sack Suits and wide, loud ties (and Jon Hamm was great at reinventing himself as wide-eyed rube for those bits).
Does Tobias Menzies pronounce his surname ‘Mingus’?
He wishes he was as good a pianist.
I thought it was pronounced Funke.
Pretty sure it’s pronounced Smith.
I was really mystified at how the trailer alone showed this series would be taking such an uncaring view to even well-known historical accuracy. Someone’s already pointed out that like many men at the time, Edwin Stanton had a giant beard, and just as baffling is that after shooting Lincoln, Booth shouts “Justice for the South” rather than “Sic semper tyranis” or even the slightly less well known statement he made, “The South will rise again.”
Another absolute shit take from a site that is sadly dead and irrelevant now.SMDH
Hasta la vista, Abey!
On episode 2 find it riveting its like Law and Order Lincon .