In 1973’s The Day of The Jackal, adapted from the novel by Frederick Forsyth, an English assassin is hired by the Far Right OAS in France to kill President Charles de Gaulle for his role in codifying into French Law an independent Algeria. It’s a long and labyrinthine thriller, with the assassination attempt painstakingly mapped out and worked toward while the police get nearer and nearer, only to end with a marvelous whimper — a casually missed shot, the assassin promptly put down, and thrown in an unmarked grave, as we learn that his identity was more slippery than we thought. It’s not a masterpiece, but it handles the trudging banality of these processes very well. Edward Fox’s Jackal is a posh, bland, but somehow occasionally charming figure, and there’s obviously a political resonance in this ’60s Brit without an identity of his own helping French terrorists retaliate against the man that they perceive as having ended a colonial project.
The contemporary Peacock version begins with a complicated assassination that we are thrown into without much context. A disguised man, Eddie Redmayne’s Jackal, infiltrates an office building and shoots a man, wounding him but notably not killing him. That man is taken to a hospital, and the Jackal moves to a hotel room in a tall building, deconstructing his suitcase and reconstructing it into an enormous modular rifle with even a detachable trigger. It turns out the man he wounded was the son of a right-wing German politician, the actual target. As the politician arrives at the hospital for a visit, the Jackal fires a shot from a couple of miles away, which takes seconds to arrive before threading neatly through the politician’s head.
This world-record sniper shot gets the Jackal noticed by two parties in particular — England’s MI6, whose Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch) spearheads (despite her superiors’ pushback) an investigation in case the killer might embarrassingly be British, and a group of businessmen led by Timothy Winthrop (Charles Dance), who hopes to hire him for a project of its own. This project is to kill Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla), or UDC, a billionaire venture capitalist fashioning himself a sort of Robin Hood, whose soon-to-launch app River purports to trace the trajectories of capital, threatening to expose dark money dealings of people like Winthrop, and apparently address extreme economic disparity (though in reality it’s debatable what impact this transparency might have on politics and the global economy — we have a handy list of AIPAC political contributions, but knowledge alone is not the whole battle). Winthrop, in any case, wants UDC dead before the launch of River, thinking that his death would stop the launch and allow his business and influence to remain untouchable.
While the immediate reaction to modern remakes or adaptations of classic material like this is often “what, why,” and with good reason, the circuitous and procedural nature of the original, in this case, actually lends itself well to serial form. Week by week, there’s some new set piece or tangential assassination, often quite cinematic — the series’ long opening sequence contains few words but sharply focuses on the Jackal’s process, attuned to the haptic and sonic dimensions of his discipline and ending with thrilling parallel montage. Revisiting the story half a century later, with a more speculative focus on the tentacular flow of global capital rather than the throes of colonial France, makes for some interesting dynamics as well. While we intellectually would, of course, prefer River to launch successfully and purportedly kneecap capitalism (though UDC seems like more of a so-called “ethical capitalism” guy), the more time we spend with the Jackal in process, performing more and more unlikely assassinations, the more invested we are that he evades MI6, and that his aim remains true for each killing, much the same way we gasp when Norman Bates sees Marion Crane’s car threaten to not fully sink into the bog and instead expose him.
And on the MI6 side, Lynch’s Bianca is quickly established as a wily and effective investigator, whose weapons expertise allows her to figure out the one man who might have made a modular rifle capable of making a miles-away shot. But she’s also a pretty horrible person, negligently orchestrating the death of the teenage daughter of one of her Northern Irish informants in the very first episode, in order to get closer to said weapons-builder. Her brutal lack of regard and her contradictory drive are quite compelling and well-performed. The show thankfully avoids the trap of Black characters being identified with only oppression or excellence, but it’s not a so-called “color-blind” casting either — her race factors into the story, as with some of the MI6 political dynamics, without being overdetermined or essentialist.
Elsewhere, the attempt at deepening characters strays from the original with some mixed results. Where the Jackal in the 1973 film was ultimately without identity beyond his bland Britishness, here we get a more or less full backstory and “home life” for Redmayne’s Jackal, pending any season 2 twists. At this point in the series, he seems to have understandably gained his marksmanship prowess in the military, and he has a wife and child, which causes some “married to the job” tension, as well as some regarding whether his wife will find out what his job really is. While these threads do motivate some captivating sequences, whether this will turn out as rich as the gap in identity that defines the ‘73 Jackal remains to be seen. Either way, to his credit, Redmayne does really pull off the eerie, empty affect that the role calls for — occasionally striving for charm when required by a mission, but always underwritten by something more quietly off-putting.
So despite these points of hesitance, and some modern streaming aesthetic annoyances such as an occasional compulsion to fill silences with bizarrely curated pop needle drops (Alt-J?), there’s enough to chew on surrounding such touches to make for a compelling watch. And the sheer number of countries we visit through the cat-and-mouse triangulation is a simple pleasure. While ‘73 mostly hopped between France, Austria, and Italy, here we have a dizzying slate of at least Germany, England, Northern Ireland, Belarus, Estonia, Hungary, Croatia, and Spain. With a second season already announced, it can be assumed that it will end differently from ‘73 (or at least take longer to get there), but in any case, season one has proved that it will be interesting to see if or how the knots of contradictory sympathies and political-economic gambits work themselves out.
CREATOR: Ronan Bennett; DIRECTORS: Brian Kirk, Paul Wilmshurst, & Anthony Philipson; CAST: Eddie Redmayne, Lashana Lynch, Úrsula Corberó, Chukwudi Iwuji; DISTRIBUTOR: Peacock; STREAMING: November 7
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