He goes by many names, but you can call him the Jackal. If you need a high-profile target taken out — say, a populist German politician, or the president of France — he’s the man to call. Should you be lucky enough to contact him, much less get this contract killer to accept your offer, it’ll certainly cost you. But the dapper, aloof Englishman’s success rate is impeccable, he can put most snipers to shame, and the gent will get the job done, no questions asked. Plus he’s a master of disguise, though when he’s not donning fake noses and wigs, he bears a striking resemblance to that guy from those Harry Potter expansion-pack prequels. But most importantly: The Jackal is No. 1 with a bullet.
Which is more than can be said for The Day of the Jackal, the 10-episode miniseries that begins streaming on Peacock on November 14th and uses the basics of Frederick Forsyth’s classic airport-read thriller as a jumping off point. Where this over-extended jaunt in the Forsythverse ends up when it finally hits the ground is more than a little questionable, given that it bogs down a taut, cat-and-mouse tale with a lot of extra narrative baggage. The Jackal is hired to kill a prominent figure. An MI6 agent must find him and stop him before he carries out the task. But never mind that — how about a lot of domestic drama involving the Jackal’s special lady friend and her brother? And a whole subplot about the fallout regarding an informant’s daughter being used as a pawn to extract info? And some inter-agency strife that kinda pays off, but not really? And… and….
It’s an issue that’s plagued too many series, limited or otherwise, to count: The need to expand a story to fill out more allotted time than the story really needs. Spend even a small amount of time with TV critics and you’ll hear the refrain about how streaming shows really aren’t just 10-hour movies, or how a perfectly great four-episode arc too often gets stuck writhing away within a bloated nine-episode release. There’s an argument to be made regarding the former for serialized one-offs, in which a paid-in-installments story with a beginning, a middle and an end hews closer to a feature-film template than it does to a trad television season. (Unless, of course, that limited series decides to become not-so-limited anymore.)
But even these aren’t immune from the temptation to pad out a story with unnecessary bits of business that, rather than adding depth, deflates and dilutes everything. And this take on Forsyth’s 1971 novel — and by extension, the whipcrack 1973 movie adaptation starring James Fox — inadvertently acts as an Exhibit A for the prosecution. Had The Day of the Jackal kept its eyes on the prize that is the predator/prey/pursuer plotline, it could have been prestige-pulp gold. Instead, it gilds the lily with unnecessary backstory and peripheral melodrama allegedly designed to “flesh out” characters, and you’re left with an epic amount of gorgeous, globetrotting Mid TV.
Still, you may want to tune into the first chapter, just to see the opening salvo. An elderly janitor in Munich stares into his mirror, parroting back banal phrases in German. Exiting a dingy flat, we see an eerily exact double of the same custodian, lying dead in his chair. The fake geriatric shuffles into an office building that houses the headquarters of a controversial ultra-right politician. A security guard’s curiosity leads to a shoot-out that wounds, but does not kill the politician’s adult son. After a daring escape from the building’s roof, the janitor enters his safe house, pulls off a rubber mask and, quicker than can say “Mission: Impossible,” reveals himself to be Eddie Redmayne. The next day, he assembles a bespoke sniper’s rifle from luggage parts (!) and patiently waits for his target to appear. The bait’s been set. Now we get to witness why the Jackal is considered the absolute top of his profession.
Redmayne is one of those British actors who gets cast in a lot of stuffy Oscarbait but can go full chameleonic when he wants to, and is never afraid to scale heights in order to go way over the top (see: Savage Grace, Jupiter Ascending, his recent run on Broadway in Cabaret). He’s clearly having fun here, slapping on wigs and trying on accents and seducing innocents who can help him stay one step ahead of the law. But Redmayne also a first-rate less-is-more actor, especially when stillness is the move, and it’s in these opening sequences that you understand why he’s smart, slightly counterintuitive pick to play the part. “Stoic assassin with ice-water in his veins” suits him better than you’d think. And unlike James Fox, whose Jackal was all patrician good looks and aristocratic manners, Redmayne has an everyguy handsomeness that allows him to appear like a matinee idol one second and blend in with a crowd the next — a handy trait when you need to exit a crime scene.
Lashana Lynch in ‘The Day of the Jackal.’
Marcell Piti/SKY/Carnival
He’s one of the best things about this updated Jackal, especially when the series slows down to procedural speed and simply observes the professional killer researching his jobs, scouting locations, shooting target practice, leading cops on high-speed pursuits in crowded metropolitan areas, i.e. your typical international assassin day-to-day workloads. It also benefits from giving him a worthy adversary in the form of Lashana Lynch, who’s a master thief when it comes to stealing scenes, not to mention walking off with whole movies. She’s arguably best-known for playing 007’s replacement-slash-sidekick in No Time to Kill, and this series lets her MI6 agent Bianca Pullman take center stage without the aid of a franchise’s patron saint. (We personally don’t need another round of speculative “who’s playing James Bond next?” tomfoolery, but seeing how well Lynch fills out the ring-a-ding Bond-style credit sequences here, we’d happily watch a spinoff series if she starred in it.)
Bianca is an expert on guns, which is why the murder which kicks everything off attracts her interest. The killshot was made from an unheard-of distance. When it’s record-breaking status is confirmed, Bianca talks her way into investigating who could have pulled this off, much to her superiors’ displeasure. The chase is now officially on. Especially because there are rumors that the Jackal is now prepping for a new job, which suggests he’s about to resurface and give away his identity. And if he successfully executes his next target, the aftershocks will be even bigger than those of his last hit.
In Forsyth’s book and the ’73 movie, the big game to be hunted was French leader Charles De Gaulle (the novel even starts with a journalistic breakdown of a real-life attempt on the former general’s life); in this Day of the Jackal, the man in the crosshairs is a tech-bro disruptor set to make life hell for some vague One-percenter mucky-mucks. Swiss bank accounts have also been replaced by dark-web direct deposits, and the event that will provide the Jackal his opportunity to complete his mission is a cross between an Apple product launch and a TED talk — your basic 21st-century glow-up, in other words.
The song remains mostly the same, however. Only the length of the tune has changed. Spending several hours with a chill killer and a dogged intelligence agent is fine for three-to-four hours. When you’re talking about 10 hours of narrative, one elongated marathon chase scene risks becoming repetitive to a fault. You understand why creator Ronan Bennett, who also gave the world the best-in-show British crime series Top Boy, might feel the need to give you more about the people chasing and being chased. It’s TV ROI 101.
Except what Jackal does give us is not one but two fairly stock familial dramas competing for resources and space, both of which suggest that even when you’re a high-paid hit man or the espionage agent tracking him down, that whole work-life balance thing is a bitch. Do we really become more invested in Bianca and her quest for justice because she feels guilty over missing her daughter’s school presentation? Does an entire episode devoted to the Jackal’s origin story — which, to be honest, makes him a far more pedestrian antihero instead of multifaceted one — serve any real purpose? Why cast Money Heist‘s MVP Úrsula Corberó, only to saddle her with the thankless task of embodying why leading a double life is, like, really difficult and has collateral damage?
Throw in side business involving the IRA that sucks the oxygen out of the series’ first half, that aforementioned handwringing over a mole within the agency that sort of fizzles before it becomes a convenient plot device, and some halfhearted jabs about torn-from-the-headlines class warfare, and what you have is something that makes an endless chase scene seem desirable by comparison. The Day of the Jackal is prime source material for a modern-day thriller that moves with a shark-like forward momentum by its high stakes alone. You don’t need to feel like you’ve just spent a year in front of your TV screens after watching it.
