‘The Day of the Jackal’ Review: Eddie Redmayne Kills in Peacock’s Occasionally Gripping, Frequently Padded Game of Cat-and-Mouse
The mountain lion that menaced Kim Bauer in the first season of Fox’s 24 was a feature, not a bug.
That ferocious feline, which probably still haunts Elisha Cuthbert’s dreams, was a proof of concept for how that boundary-breaking series could to extend its high-wire premise across 24 hours per season: Not everything could be an A-story or a B-story, but in Jack Bauer’s world, even the filler was fraught with tension.
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Or at least it theoretically was. As even the most passionate fans will tell you, the detours were occasionally thrilling, occasionally ludicrously entertaining and sometimes just plain awful. But they served the purpose of elongating the excitement, and with 24, elongation was everything. Whatever pleasures the subsequent telefilm or two 12-part seasons provided, they made clear that a condensed 24 might be many things, but it wasn’t 24.
There wouldn’t have been room for a cougar in Fredrick Forsyth’s 1971 novel, The Day of the Jackal, nor in Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 feature. I hear the title and I think of a meticulous yet breathless game of cat-and-mouse, blessed with a taut purity of purpose: Will the killer known as the Jackal be able to carry out a complicated assassination or not?
By contrast, there’s plenty of room for cougars — metaphorical ones, at least — in Peacock’s new 10-hour adaptation of The Day of the Jackal, created by Ronan Bennett (Top Boy). It goes almost without saying that there’s a great two-hour movie in this Peacock series, or possibly even a great four-hour miniseries. But for the six episodes in the middle, the season becomes cougars all the way down, as one digression after another to keeps pulling at the ostensibly fine thread that is the core plot.
Even with an understanding of the strategy and an appreciation of many other aspects of the show — including stars Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch, plus some exceptional European location shooting — the detours become a real drag in places. And just as “truncated” never really felt like 24‘s brand, “sluggish” isn’t an ideal match for The Day of the Jackal.
The British drama begins with Redmayne’s Jackal, rendered only partially recognizable under layers of old-age makeup, carrying out an operation in Munich. So far as we can tell, the Jackal fails in his job. The truth is that the careful planner is just setting himself up for a bigger kill — the assassination of a right-wing political figure, conducted via sniper rifle at a distance generally considered to be impossible.
It’s the difficulty of the shot that attracts the attention of MI6 agent Bianca Pullman (Lynch), a firearms expert with an academic husband (Sule Rimi’s Paul) and a teenage daughter (Florisa Kamara’s Jasmine), whose mere presence means that she will inevitably be put in jeopardy.
Fresh off of the German job, the Jackal is offered his biggest target yet. Tech billionaire Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla) is about to roll out a new piece of software called River, designed basically to follow trails of money, on the grounds that only through transparency will we see how nefarious corporate interests control our lives.
Naturally, other rich people are NOT pleased. A shady consortium of oligarchs led by Timothy Winthrop (professional oligarch-player Charles Dance), parroting a bunch of conservative talking points, wants the Jackal to put an end to Ulle Dag Charles and River both. The oligarchs insist that the Jackal be supervised by the mysterious Zina (Eleanor Matsuura, one of the few elements to get better as the episodes go on), which he doesn’t appreciate.
Soon, Bianca is on the Jackal’s trail, getting help and interference from her bosses, including Isabel (Lia Williams) and Osi (Chukwudi Iwuji), as well as dealing with the prospect that there’s a mole in MI6, because The Day of the Jackal has been 24-ized to the nth degree.
Or maybe it’s been James Bond-ized? Lynch, of course, faced a wave of pushback on racist Twitter (now simply known as “X”) when she was cast as the new 007 agent in No Time to Die. If you changed the title and added a “Broccoli” to the production list, this thriller could be a reasonable template for a television spinoff, right down to Celeste’s opening credits anthem, “This Is Who I Am,” which would instantly be a top ten Bond theme.
Especially in its first two and last two chapters, The Day of the Jackal delivers both methodical intrigue — Bianca and the Jackal are admirably process-driven — and large-scale set pieces filmed in various European hubs including London, Budapest, Croatia and more. There are shootouts, at least one great cobblestone car chase and some carefully edited suspense sequences, all accompanied by a pervasively cynical attitude that prevents the show from feeling excessively formulaic.
But the wheel-spinning in the middle of the season is conspicuous. I’m guessing Bennett would argue that this approach honors the world around our two protagonists and humanizes background characters who would be collateral damage in a shorter version of this tale. Adding dimension to, say, the Northern Irish arms manufacturer (Richard Dormer, providing a jolt of midseason vigor) who supplies the Jackal with his fancy toys or a beautiful Spanish woman (úrsula Corberó, trying hard) with connections to the Jackal, presumably serve to remind that this isn’t a game for anyone on the periphery. Fair. I just didn’t need six hours of it. And for all the padding, Bianca still gets a partner (Nick Blood’s Vince) who’s simply there for four or five installments without an individual voice or characterization or anything.
Also failing to emerge as a rounded character is Ulle Dag Charles, who exists to go on open water swims in the Adriatic and to make enough vague yet sanctimonious statements about data transparency that it’s never clear whether we’re supposed to root for him to survive. The idea of having a tech billionaire as the Jackal’s target, rather than a global political leader, is a fully worthy and accurate attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the contemporary power. However, the execution feels like a superficial copy of a copy. There’s very little of the friction that actual proximity to reality would provide, to the point that this thriller is coming out less than six months after an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate, yet does not elicit an iota of discomfort or recognition or resonance.
Instead of generating the feeling that this premise could be real, viewers are more likely to come away with the sense that it’s already been fictional — whether they’re comparing The Day of the Jackal to previous adaptations of the same story, to 24 or to the countless other stories about seemingly monastic assassins, from Le Samoura? to David Fincher’s The Killer.
The Jackal is nevertheless a role that plays into many of Redmayne’s strengths. Not every actor could make endlessly staring into the scope of a rifle compelling, but Redmayne brings his gift for infusing stillness with intensity in scenes of the Jackal calculating for wind or waiting for the right angle. While he brings the character to emotional life in performative bursts of humanity, my favorite thing about the entire series is that it doesn’t pretend, even for a second, that the Jackal does what he does for altruistic reasons, or that he lives by a rigorous moral code. He kills people for money and prioritizes finishing the job, and the show accepts those instincts at face value.
This is why the Jackal and Bianca are a good pairing. Because she’s an expert with a particular preoccupation, rather than a traditional spy, she operates without the elegance of spycraft. Lynch plays Bianca as perpetually irritated and ineffectively diplomatic. She isn’t good at the part of the job that might let a more socially inclined agent think of personal or professional consequences or a more traditional TV character worry about likability or longevity. She isn’t thinking about a second season.
The Day of the Jackal, though, kind of is thinking of a second season. I mention this not as a spoiler, but as a reflection of my own frustration at realizing that a narrative already stretched beyond its ideal boundaries was going to leave at least some aspects open-ended. At some point, the ruthless efficiency I associate with the Day of the Jackal becomes lost entirely — leaving viewers trapped in a sea of tertiary plotlines, like so many contrived cougars in the hills above Los Angeles.
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