How one feels about Apple TV’s new 10-part Cape Fear adaptation will depend largely on whether one buys Javier Bardem’s well-worn tough-guy routine. In 2012’s James Bond movie, Skyfall, the Spaniard played an ex-MI6 agent damaged in body and soul, but he hid his character’s depravity behind a layer of icy politeness. Even the 57-year-old’s most celebrated role, as the hitman Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), featured similar choices: dead-eyed serenity masking murderous intent. I found both of those performances mannered and obnoxious. Go ahead and put my critics’ guild application in the trash. For those who disagree, the new series offers yet another exercise in elegantly veiled menace. Bardem plays Max Cady, a deranged ex-con previously portrayed by Robert Mitchum in the 1962 film and by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake. In both movies, Cady left prison only after completing his full sentence for rape, a circumstance meant to put his villainy beyond doubt. Here, in keeping with contemporary preoccupations, the fellow may well have been innocent in the first place. Released after the discovery of new evidence, the now-hardened Cady returns to Savannah, Georgia, to confront the lawyers who put him away. In an irony in which showrunner Nick Antosca clearly delights, one of those attorneys, Anna Bowden (Amy Adams), now works for the Savannah Justice League Project, a leftist nonprofit group that aids the wrongfully jailed but that pointedly did nothing for Cady. Though Anna represented the older man at trial 17 years earlier, she believed him guilty then and convinced him to take a plea. Worse still, she ended up marrying Cady’s prosecutor, Tom Bowden (Patrick Wilson), shortly thereafter. One needn’t be Captain Ahab to fathom why revenge might be on the convicted man’s mind.