‘High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam’ Review: Joel Kinnaman Plays the CIA Analyst Who Interrogated Saddam Hussein in TNT’s Clumsy Miniseries

High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam represents a new era for TNT, not just because it (along with The Librarians: The Next Chapter) marks a return to original programming for the once-prolific cable giant, but because if High Value Target had been made for TNT 20 years ago, it would have been called Nixon & Hussein and it would have been about a former CIA operative and a former Iraqi dictator who bicker, flirt and solve crimes.

Nixon & Hussein also likely would have been better than High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam, an eight-episode limited series that probably should have been a feature and maybe even should have just been a play. High Value Target boasts a solid “Look at me, I’m nerdy!” lead performance from Joel Kinnaman, a couple of decent episodes in the middle of the season and a very worthwhile and pointed message. But the adaptation of John Nixon’s Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein is so packed with fictionalization, contrivance and one-dimensional secondary characters that what’s true frequently gets lost in the ludicrousness.

The arduous process of bringing Debriefing the President to the screen is evident in its credits.

To begin with, it’s only “inspired by” the book in question, which is an easy way of saying, “Ummm, we took a few liberties.” Daniel Stiepleman and Jonathan Wakeham get a “created by” credit, while Leslie Greif takes a “developed by” credit, with Greif adding an “a series by” credit, resulting in a title card hodgepodge I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen before.

Nixon, if you don’t know, is/was the CIA analyst who was the first American to interrogate Saddam Hussein after the former Iraqi dictator was captured in December 2003. He wasn’t the only American to interrogate Saddam Hussein, nor was he the American whose interrogation of Saddam Hussein received the most publicity (that would be George Piro), but he was the first.

The series begins with the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and positions Nixon (Kinnaman) as a bookish low-level analyst glued to a desk in Langley. People repeatedly and obsessively refer to him as the agency’s Saddam Hussein expert, but nobody listens to him, because he’s too interested in history and context. While it isn’t a part of the show’s critique that a decade after removing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, the CIA had exactly one person studying Saddam Hussein, it’s absolutely part of the show’s critique that nobody at the CIA was interested in history and context when it came time to invade Iraq.

I’ve already said that Nixon is best known as the first American to interrogate Saddam Hussein after his capture. He’s also known, because he mentioned it in his book, as the man who positively identified Hussein based on tattoos and scars. He is not, however, known as “the man who caught Saddam Hussein,” but that’s what Greif has decided inexplicably to make him into. In the space of three episodes, Nixon goes from an ignored desk jockey to a nervous agent in the field to being the only man who figured out where Saddam Hussein was hiding, basically leading the military operation to retrieve him and single-handedly finding his notorious spider hole.

Over the next five hours, there are multiple instances in which Nixon walks into rooms and receives ovations as “the man who caught Saddam Hussein,” a claim made so frequently and so thoroughly here at the expense of every other human involved in the process that I’m guessing Nixon has friends or colleagues who are going to bust his balls about this one.

Of course, you have no choice but to think that Nixon was the man who caught Saddam Hussein, because nearly every other character in the series is somewhere between created out of whole cloth and heavily fictionalized.

Including 2012’s very respectable Hatfields & McCoys, 2022’s very silly The Offer and this winter’s very bad The Gray House, I’ve seen enough historical miniseries from Greif to know that he’s very good at dramatizing actual historical events, but very bad at creating fictional composite characters who feel like real people and just as bad at fictionalizing and embellishing the actions of real historical figures.

Unfortunately, High Value Target contains much more of the latter two elements than the first.

In terms of his personal life, John has a crotchety father (Tom Berenger’s Charles), who served in three wars and chides his son for never serving in the field, and a wife (Rebecca Night’s Rebecca) with MS. Those are their only character traits: He’s grouchy and she’s patiently waiting. Oh, and John has a dog. The dog has no personality traits, though on the night Nixon catches Hussein, Rebecca hugs the dog and tells him, “He got him!” Even the dog knows that other people were probably involved.

As for those other people, there are two other CIA-type figures (Lena Góra’s Polly and Ewan Miller’s Jerry) with no evident jobs or discernible personality traits, plus a translator (Dar Salim) also with no personalty traits, who turns out not even to be necessary, since in this version of events Saddam Hussein (Waleed Zuaiter) speaks near-perfect English.

If you’re looking for the reason why the war in Iraq and, particularly, its aftermath were such a mess, look no further than Nixon being the only person in the entire U.S. government with a fully developed character and therefore capable of both catching Saddam Hussein and spotting every single flaw with our operational strategies.

Around midseason, High Value Target hits the interrogation with Saddam Hussein. And for two episodes, the show is interesting and interestingly pragmatic. Nixon’s bosses want him to go in and get the location for the weapons of mass destruction — as John Nixon: The Only Man at the CIA Who Knew Anything, Nixon already knew our entire pretext for the war was a lie — but Nixon wants…actually, it’s hard to exactly know what his goals are, but he gets a rudimentary lesson in Iraqi and Middle Eastern history.

I think it could be easily argued that High Value Target has rose-colored glasses when it comes to Hussein, presenting him as a gardening, novel-writing, affectionate father who thought that he and the United States were friends and then felt sad and betrayed.

Whether we fully buy this interpretation of Hussein, the show’s ultimate message — that the second Iraq war was all about daddy issues and oil, with no consideration for what would come next — ties perfectly and tragically into a current don’t-call-it-a-war with Iran in ways Greif and the other writers could only vaguely have anticipated when the writing process began.

It’s a good point, repeated ad nauseam for several episodes, but then driven home in a truly awful finale scene in which Nixon gets to sit down with melted wax museum replicas of George W. Bush (Paul Ryan, dismal), Condoleezza Rice (Danielle Lewis, unconvincing) and characters who might or might not be Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

It isn’t just a bad and seemingly endless scene, it undoes the smartest directing choice made by Greif, who helmed all eight episodes — namely, utilizing extensive amounts of news and documentary footage, grounding this fictionalized account in a vein of authenticity. If you’ve featured the actual George W. Bush in multiple addresses to the nation, you don’t get to toss in an actor who doesn’t resemble Bush in the slightest doing a thin Bush parody unless your goal was to undermine everything that came before.

Greif, mostly a writer and producer previously, is a generally uninspired director. The two-hander scenes that make up the interrogation are just fine, but every action scene feels both superfluous and bland, eschewing familiar gritty handheld aesthetics in favor of flat and forgettable conflict staging.

Kinnaman, boasting a mustache and glasses as part of his nerd transformation, conveys Nixon’s evolution more believably than the series’ writing does, but otherwise High Value Target is short on memorable performances. Zuaiter bellows and sneers as Hussein, which is as valid an interpretation as any. Berenger is plagued by much of the worst dialogue, but there’s a midseason episode in which his character tells Nixon’s wife about his own military experiences, and Berenger delivers those monologues astonishingly well.

One last point: Some people are bound to be perplexed or even irritated that TNT has chosen to premiere High Value Target on the weekend of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with. The release date is perhaps the most subversive part of the show, because when Berenger’s character watches Bush’s notorious “Mission Accomplished” speech and declares, “That’s for the World Trade Tower, you sons of bitches,” Nixon sets him straight and the show is mocking Dear Ol’ Dad and Bush simultaneously. It’s a broad moment, but one with a point behind it.

The series has its arguments and makes them adequately, however frequently it fails as drama. And TNT, you might recall, used to have a whole marketing campaign about how they knew drama.

Now don’t mind me, I’m getting back to work on my script for Nixon & Hussein, coming to TNT in 2027.