The last time we saw Leo Woodall, he was drinking wine in a London park and chilling out to the Cocteau Twins in Netflix’s adaptation of David Nicholls’s sobathon, One Day. Sadly, there’s no time for dawdling – nor, alas, the Cocteau Twins – in his tremendously silly new Apple TV+ technothriller, Prime Target (from Wednesday), in which the British actor plays a wildly improbable mash-up of Harry Potter and Stephen Hawking.
Woodall is Edward Brooks, a boy genius Cambridge maths whizz on the brink of cracking a puzzle that could remake civilisation as we know it. Disappointingly, the imponderable question turns out not to be “Why can’t Mayo win an All Ireland?” but has something to do with prime numbers, internet encryption and buried ruins in Iraq.
Oh, there is also a shadowy global conspiracy prepared to biff off any boffin brave enough to run the numbers and work out that these three seemingly disparate threads are fatally intertwined. In my school, being good at maths could get you beaten up in the yard after class. Here, it might just earn you a bullet in the head.
It’s a ridiculous romp from Sherlock writer Steve Thompson, though it does at least have the courage to take itself seriously and never once winks at the camera (a death knell to this manner of froth). David Morrissey plays Edward’s protective mentor – who artlessly tries to steer his protege away from a line of research that could get them all killed. There are bonus turns by Stephen Rea, as a senior academic with a villainously plummy accent (you can tell Rea is relishing playing an Evil Brit) and Tyrone actor Fra Fee as a Cambridge barman and Edward’s on-off love interest.
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With its bumbling postgraduate lead and ornate conspiracy theories, the tone is Saltburn meets The Da Vinci Code. In a doomed stab at prestige TV chic, the producers have also chucked in Sidse Babett Knudsen, of Borgen fame, as an archaeologist who spots a possible link between Edward’s cutting-edge algebra and the ancient dig-site in Iraq. Meanwhile, Harry Lloyd, from Game of Thrones, has a cackling good time as a shadowy representative of the deep state.
Indiana Jones-style buried temples, killer maths, Stephen Rea giving it the full Jeremy Irons in Die Hard III ... these are the raw materials for a thoroughly absurd thriller – and a formula Prime Target cracks with style. A dumbed-down show about very smart people, it is riotously preposterous and great fun if you fancy giving your brain the night off.
