‘The Day of the Jackal’ Review: Eddie Redmayne’s Puffed-Up Peacock Show Feels Like a Year of Your Life
Complaining that you’ve seen this story before — specifically in regard to an adaptation of a book first published in 1971 that was already made into a movie in 1973 and again made into another movie in 1997 — is generally a waste of time. “The Day of the Jackal” is a piece of intellectual property. The only reason there’s a new iteration of Frederick Forsyth’s novel is because readers liked it back in the day, and then moviegoers liked seeing the story play out onscreen, and then moviegoers went to see it again 20 years later (even though very few of them seemed to enjoy the Bruce Willis/Richard Gere version, including Forsyth, who filed an injunction to keep the film from using the same title as his book).
But hey, just because Roger Ebert ranked Fred Zinnemann’s “The Day of the Jackal” among his 10 best films of 1973 and then ranked “The Jackal” among his 10 worst films of 1997, that doesn’t mean the franchise is dead. If anything, it means most of the franchise’s maiden fans are dead — 1971 was a long time ago, and the poor reaction to the latest remake may have soured people on the property for… 27 years? Now, the I.P. needs to be refreshed. And where there’s a timeless genre (international assassin), a preserved copyright (from Universal Pictures to NBCUniversal), and a streaming service in need of new content (hello, Peacock), there’s a way.
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To be fair, “The Day of the Jackal” (2024) does its due diligence in updating Forsyth’s action-thriller for modern-day audiences. Underpinning the cat-and-mouse game between The Jackal (Eddie Redmayne), a mysterious hitman known only by his code name, and the obsessive MI6 officer, Bianca (Lashana Lynch), is a class war orchestrated by the obscenely wealthy and a family drama implying it’s impossible to find a proper work/life balance when the job you need to live requires more hours than there are in a day. Written by Ronan Bennett, the Peacock series even does the work to connect the dots between the untouchable billionaires who control the politicians, the politicians who control government’s middle-managers, and the middle-managers who take advantage of their working-class employees’ willingness to do whatever it takes to keep their jobs (and, sometimes, who want to do whatever it takes anyway, because they take pride in their work).
Less meaningful (though always timely) are the tired parallels drawn between cops and killers. Even if the Jackal and Bianca are both puppets of the man, we’ve seen those comparisons too many times before, in official “Jackal” properties and countless other action flicks, which brings us back to redundancy. “The Day of the Jackal” is a story we’ve seen before, and whether or not that’s why you’re watching or this is your first time out, the latest series suffocates under the weight of its own repetition. At 10 hourlong episodes, Season 1 is egregiously bloated — overburdened with extraneous subplots and protracted scenes that’s very length tips the best moments from kind-of-cool to tiresomely pretentious. By the end, not only is there not enough to distinguish the show from its other tellings, the sheer length proves so damaging it’s difficult to enjoy “The Day of the Jackal” as pure genre fair. There’s better assassin stories out there, better spy stories, and better I.P.
Here, Redmayne’s Jackal is defined by three characteristics: First, he’s a master of disguise. The nine-minute opening sequence shows him donning the persona of a well-placed janitor. The Jackal practices his thick, gravelly accent while applying latex and makeup to look like the much older gentleman. It’s a trick he’ll deploy repeatedly, whether he’s trying to impersonate someone (“Mission: Impossible” style) or simply avoid being seen as himself. Each time, it’s convincing, but each time, we spend more and more minutes watching him put on or take off the disguises, and it’s never more impressive than the first time out.
Second, the Jackal is an expert marksman. One of his early hits — though notably not his first hit, since that would be too efficient for this script — is done at such a great distance, it evokes disbelief from various experts (“Oh, the Germans measured the distance? Make those dummies measure it again.”) and draws attention from British authorities. In the season’s second half, you’ll learn a bit about how the Jackal honed his skills and got started as an assassin-for-hire, but the really telling flashbacks are reserved for later. These don’t get into why he joined the army to begin with or what about his demeanor or talents made him such a good fit for a sniper rifle.
Finally, the Jackal is also a family man. When he’s not dashing around Europe, he’s relaxing at his home in Spain with Nuria (úrsula Corberó), his wife, their infant son, and her constantly nagging immediate family. (An extremely late-arriving subplot involving her brother is one of the show’s most unnecessary diversions.) But laying out by the pool, puttering his time away, isn’t enough for the man they call Chris. No, he needs more. He’s not an adrenaline junkie or the kind of secret killer who savors getting as close to the people looking for him as possible, but he needs to work, and he wants to work.
The same can be said for Bianca. While she doesn’t dress up like an old woman to avoid detection or sport particularly impressive gun skills, she does strain to mimic the happy wife and mother while at home with her husband and teenage daughter, and she can certainly handle herself well enough when the bullets start flying at work. She’s not addicted to the rush either, and she doesn’t romanticize the journey over the destination when it comes to chasing down her targets, but she, too, needs to work and likes her job.
Sadly, Lynch — an actor previously praised for supporting roles in “The Woman King” and “No Time To Die” — gets hung out to dry as a co-lead here. Not only is her character oversimplified, but her performance feels flat and repetitive because of all that extraneous screentime. While Redmayne gets to transform again and again, showing off his shifting physicality, intonations, and charms, Lynch is stuck in chase mode: always running down leads only to get frustrated when they don’t pan out, always fighting with her family about what she does and why she does it, always trying to bring moral complexity to a cop who’s completely off the deep end. (Her character’s reaction to her first big mistake is clearly meant to immediately connect Bianca and the Jackal — they both have undue blood on their hands, gosh darn it! — but it’s such a massive, life-ruining fuck-up that moving on is all-but impossible, no matter what Lynch does to convey guilt.)
Beyond the topical themes (we really gotta do something about these billionaires, you guys), “The Day of the Jackal” does offer a few solid sequences and set pieces. Director Brian Kirk’s recurring use of mirrors to illustrate his subjects’ deceptive intentions (and inescapable truths) — most notably seen in the Jackal and Bianca’s shared fatal flaws — pays off in the finale with an expected but satisfying showpiece shot. Every time the Jackal lines up a target set an “impossible” distance, there’s considerable tension as we wait for him to pull the trigger. The makeup, cinematography, and editing all work together to help make the Jackal’s disguises convincing and impressive, and the action scenes are thankfully not too dark to see or too quickly cut together to tell what’s going on.
And yet, none of that is what I’ll remember about “The Day of the Jackal.” Instead, I’ll remember how long it felt to sit through it and how painfully it overextended its story. Whether Peacock demanded 10 hours per season or the filmmakers though they needed that much time themselves, there’s simply too much and too little happening at once. Even the spycraft — which starts off strong — deteriorates over the course of too many episodes and too much time. (Watching a character carelessly dispose of a phone once is forgivable, but two or three times? In a series that stresses the importance of details? Sorry, but that’s a problem.)
If there has to be another “Day of the Jackal” — be it Season 2 or some other remake — I pray that it feels more like 24 hours and less like 27 years.
Grade: C-
“The Day of the Jackal” premieres Thursday, November 14 on Peacock. Five episodes will be released at launch, then one per week for three weeks, before the final two episodes debut December 12.
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