I Watch TV: The Day Of The Jackal

 

The Day Of The Jackal (2024)

In Hamburg mysterious assassin The Jackal (Eddie Redmayne) disguises himself as a janitor, enters the offices of Elias Fest and injures him. The next day Elias’s father, right-wing politician Manfred Fest, tipped to win big at the imminent elections, goes to the hospital to visit him. The Jackal shoots him from well over 2000m, dismantles his rifle and escapes.

In London MI6’s resident gun nerd Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch) of 303 section interrupts a meeting about the assassination with their German counterpart. She asks several questions then lays out some thoughts. This, an extraordinary, perhaps record-breaking range for a sniper, requires someone obsessive. They have not found the gun and CCTV footage of their suspect has him with a piece of luggage too small for such a rifle. Yet surely he would not abandon such a weapon. She suggests that it is a two-part barrel, something that gunsmiths have been experimenting with, and now seems to have been perfected. There is one candidate, Norman Stoke, former UVF member, now freelance, also vanished.

Bianca has a contact, from her time in the Northern Ireland section, Norman’s sister-in-law. She tries to get information from her but she doesn’t know where Norman is. To put pressure on her Bianca has her daughter, a student in London, arrested at a protest. Unfortunately the daughter dies of a heart attack in the cells; Bianca manages to get her information but this leads to a violent confrontation with Norman’s brother, a former UVF terrorist.

The Jackal meanwhile has returned home to Spain where he has a big house in the middle of nowhere and a wife and baby son who know nothing of his hitman work. He also has a nosy mother-in-law and a brother-in-law who wants him to invest in his schemes. Logging on to his anonymous murder message board he discovers that he’s wanted for another assassination, a big one.

UDC (Khalid Abdella) a tech-billionaire and financial-transparency activist is planning to release River, a program that will reveal where dark money goes. Shadowy Anglo-American businessman Winthrop (Charles Dance) wants to stop him. UDC's board doesn’t want him to release it, but on the other he’s determined. He lives on an island off Croatia with impenetrable security. They want the Jackal to penetrate it, and will pay an enormous amount, though they insist he meet up with their agent Zina Jansone (Elena Matsuura), which he doesn’t like.

Another thing he doesn’t like is that his previous client is refusing to pay up (his terms are half now, half on delivery). This then is the show; Bianca tries to find the Jackal’s gunsmith and so locate the Jackal. Meanwhile the Jackal needs a special gun, but also to deal with his own family issues and the fallout from the previous hit.

Based on the Fredrick Forsyth novel about an assassination of Charles de Gaulle this brings things up to date, though perhaps not successfully. The Jackal’s backstory and current family complicate things, humanise him. Perhaps even make him vulnerable. Do we need that? This, and and the unspoken plot point that he relies on dark money movements, make this personal for him. Like in the novel and previous adaptions he picks up a man to use his flat; unlike previous adaptions he has sex with him. He is both a cypher, able to make himself whoever he needs to be to do the job, and also a particular man. It’s interesting, and a definite change.

Bianca also has things brought home to her, her obsession with finding The Jackal putting herself, her career, her family at risk. So far so expected for a spy thriller. Yet another aspect of the novel (et al) is leaks; the Americans pick up chatter that The Jackal’s next target is UDC. Meanwhile someone leaks information on the hunt for him, reaching Jansone and so the Jackal. Again this is remixed differently to the novel.

Finally our villain, Winthrop, a classic shady financier. He notes that they’ll all go to jail if River launches. But would they? The Panama Papers, The Paradise Papers, The Pandora Papers – all out in the world and convictions or even firings are very thin on the ground. Of course he says several other things that are wrong; after they scramble to find a hit team in Estonia to stop Bianca, a group  of Russian mercenaries fail. Winthrop claims that Russians are all drunk and incompetent (racist, false) and that this was the problem with the Roman Empire, when they relied on foreign troops they fell (very wrong, using allied and foreign troops was a speciality of the Romans from our earliest records of Republican Rome). Maybe he’s supposed to be old, wrong, even stupid.

Stupid though is not this show's style. It loves to bounce around Europe, either The Jackal or Bianca leaving chaos in their wake. Car crashes, gunfights, awkward and occasionally weird adventures, disguises, seductions. They recreate the scene from the 1973 film where The Jackal goes out to sight his new weird gun by shooting at a melon, and it’s still great. Do we need so much personal life for The Jackal, or for Bianca his hunter? Well perhaps not but the lovely looking setpieces, the short and  brutally effective violence and the occasional moments of cleverness pay for all.

Watch This: Good-looking, well-made, smartly-designed assassination thriller
Don’t Watch This: The updating has not made it any cleverer, and the length does it no favours