The Day of the Jackal (Sky Atlantic)
A convertible sports car on a road on the edge of a cliff next to the Mediterranean. At the wheel, a young woman with her hair down and a light of love in her eyes; at his side, a ruthless killer.
Eddie Redmayne, in this sensational remake of The Day of the Jackal, takes every cliché from the James Bond films and gives it a polish and a twist to make it dazzle again. Urbane, sardonic, inscrutable and old school… cool like Connery, charming like Moore, deadly like Craig.
This isn’t just the best TV thriller since The Night Manager. It is also Redmayne who bids to be the next 007 and eliminates all the competition.
Only one question remains: is he too redheaded to be Bond?
Eddie Redmayne, in this sensational new version of The Day of the Jackal, takes all the clichés of the James Bond films and gives them a polish and a twist to make them dazzle again.
This isn’t just the best TV thriller since The Night Manager. It is also Redmayne who bids to be the next 007 and eliminates all the competition.
Screenwriter Ronan Bennett is clearly a devotee of classic thrillers, because he has transported Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 bestseller into the 21st century without losing any of its original value. It features car chases and surveillance, shootouts and explosions, political disputes and terrorist brutality.
If you believed, like me, that smart, high-octane action series were no longer possible in a waking world, The Day of the Jackal proves us wrong.
The novel famously became a manual for would-be assassins, due to its meticulous descriptions of the “trade,” and this adaptation is faithful to Forsyth’s style.
We see every step of the Jackal’s preparations for each kill, starting with an ambush in an office. To gain entry, Redmayne’s character (we never learn his name) not only disguises himself as a grumpy janitor but imitates his accent, parroting his grumpy complaints.
What at first appears to be a simple assassination task turns out to be anything but. The job requires a series of shocking twists, but every time we think the killer has made a mistake, it turns out he planned it this way.
Even when he appears to be cornered on the roof of a tower, with the police gathering below, he has all the smoke bombs and rappelling ropes he needs to escape. And that’s all before the opening credits roll.
The Jackal is an amoral superman. He kills for money and, as he tells his clients, he is not interested in knowing why they want to kill their enemies.
But in this new version (unlike the 1973 film starring Edward Fox), he is also a devoted family man, with a Spanish wife, a one-year-old son and a farm in rural Cádiz.
Lynch has to work hard to keep us from disliking him. She bullies and betrays Alison, while constantly disappointing her own family.
The novel famously became a manual for would-be assassins due to its meticulous descriptions of the “trade,” and this adaptation is faithful to Forsyth’s style.
Charles Dance, a particularly shady billionaire named Timothy Winthorp, is so interested in removing this app permanently that he sends an underling to hire the Jackal’s services for $100 million.
His beloved companion Nuria, played by Ursula Corbero, is fiery and full of jealous suspicion, adding a realistic layer of complexity to the Jackal’s coldly rational methods.
In the book, his ultimate target is the French head of state, Charles de Gaulle. Clearly, Sky Atlantic is not going to commission a series about a plot to assassinate France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron; On the one hand, it would be in bad taste, and on the other, no one would care enough to continue watching it.
This time, the man in the crosshairs is a figure in the mold of Elon Musk, a tech entrepreneur named Ulle Dag Charles or UDC (Khalid Abdalla). It is developing an app that promises complete transparency in banking, so that financial transactions cannot be hidden. This, he claims, will create “global economic justice.”
Personally, I don’t see that software catching on. You don’t have to be an obscure billionaire to feel like the world doesn’t have to know how you earn or spend every penny.
Charles Dance, a particularly shady billionaire named Timothy Winthorp, is so interested in removing this app permanently that he sends an underling to hire the Jackal’s services for $100 million. This leads to a series of meetings that are never face to face: the killer’s first greeting is invariably: “Don’t turn around.”
Hot on their trail is British intelligence expert and weapons fanatic Bianca (Lashana Lynch, who co-starred in the last Bond film, No Time To Die). She brings echoes of Killing Eve: a maverick woman within MI6, conflicted about the morality of her job but so committed to it that she is driving her husband away.
Bianca must answer to a boss whose emotionlessness is downright psychopathic, and a department head (Chukwudi Iwuji) who couldn’t look more like a mole if he had mustaches and velvety fur.
His beloved companion Nuria, played by Úrsula Corberó, is fiery and full of jealous suspicions, adding a realistic layer of complexity to the Jackal’s coldly rational methods.
No one at MI6 wants to hear that the assassin terrorizing Europe is probably a former British army man, or that his rifle appears to be a British prototype. But Bianca is determined to prove it by blackmailing the wife of a loyalist thug in Belfast and imprisoning her daughter.
Born in Belfast, writer Bennett served time in the 1970s for his alleged involvement in an IRA murder and armed robbery (before his conviction was overturned). The scenes in which Bianca confronts the frightened and bitter Alison (Kate Dickie) in a city clothing store, and her subsequent attempts to obtain the information MI6 needs, have a cruelly convincing realism.
Lynch has to work hard to keep us from disliking him. She bullies and betrays Alison, while constantly disappointing her own family. It is only the fact that she cannot forgive herself that allows us to excuse her.
But it’s not hard to admire the Jackal: Redmayne is thoroughly English, with a touch of poise and a touch of self-deprecation that keeps his infallibility from becoming an annoyance.
Some of his kills are downright ruthless, but we can see that he gets no satisfaction from them: they’re just part of the job, and as Paul McCartney sang about Bond: “He’ll do it right… he’ll hit the other guy.” hell.’
And what is the next job? It could be that he is in Her Majesty’s secret service.