The Day Of The Jackal

Episodes viewed: 10 of 10
Streaming on: Sky / NOW

Fred Zinnemann’s admirably faithful 1973 adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day Of The Jackal managed two rather unusual feats. It was, on the one hand, a surprising triumph of the mundane, with Michael Lonsdale’s methodical, shoe-leather approach to investigation paying dividends in what was essentially a nation-hopping police procedural. More interesting, though, was the way its dual POV narrative encouraged audiences to root just as hard for Edward Fox’s cold-blooded assassin — a nameless cypher, about whom we end the film knowing almost nothing. It’s that latter point that Top Boy creator Ronan Bennett has seized upon with this modernised adaptation, electing to properly delve into the character of Forsyth’s chameleonic killer.

We become acquainted with Eddie Redmayne’s exceedingly British gun-for-hire via an extended prologue in which he meticulously sets up and executes a show-stopping kill. After baiting his trap while disguised as a surly German cleaner, he takes down his mark from nearly four kilometres away, in a breathless scene reminiscent of David Fincher’s The Killer, minus the Morrissey playlist and bucket hat. It’s a precision-calibrated sequence that’s as economical as it is exhilarating — the final, explosive impact of bullet on skull proving a perfect calling card for both The Jackal himself and Bennett’s cat-and-mouse thriller, which revels in the detail of the assassin’s elaborate tradecraft throughout ten tightly structured episodes.

After playing everything from Stephen Hawking to a zoophilist wizard, Redmayne reveals a surprisingly different side here: hard, cold, steely and efficient. On the one hand, he is a studied, calculating murderer who, while not delighting in bloodshed, leaves no witnesses and approaches each kill with an almost academic detachment, as if noodling the cryptic crossword rather than planning how to best end a life. His is a reptilian presence, oozing menace. The snakeskin sloughs off the moment he returns home to his Spanish wife Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) and their baby son — not a sociopath, but a doting husband and father trying (and failing) to maintain some semblance of work/life balance. If this sounds ridiculous to the point of farce, it’s testament to both Redmayne’s nuanced performance and Bennett’s restrained storytelling that it is convincingly executed with absolute sincerity, deftly humanising someone we’ve watched open a man’s throat with a sharpened credit card. As with Top Boy, Bennett’s captivation with the criminal-outsider perspective is central, delighting in the moral discomfort it provokes in the viewer.

Manages to retain the paranoia-inducing tone of a ’70s thriller.

The yin to Redmayne’s yang is Bianca Pullman, placing Lashana Lynch back on His Majesty’s payroll as a somewhat maverick MI6 agent who’s not a million miles from her 007 in No Time To Die — fitting for a show with such Bondian panache, sliding as it does between sun-drenched Mediterranean hotspots. Like her quarry, Bianca is herself struggling to reconcile the job with family commitments, providing a neat parallel that balances both sides of the story. This equanimity is aided further by Lynch’s deliciously spiky performance and Bianca’s unflinching ruthlessness, willing to sacrifice lives (even innocent ones) in her single-minded pursuit. If the domestic sequences occasionally sap momentum — a few scenes of indignant outrage from Bianca’s husband or hare-brained schemes from The Jackal’s fuckwit brother-in-law would hardly have been missed — the expanded character dimension largely makes up for it.

Swapping the original’s plot against Charles de Gaulle for one to off Khalid Abdalla’s Muskian tech bro gives this update a contemporary slant, anchoring its story in corporate greed, technology and late-stage capitalism. It also adds a welcome note of uncertainty, ensuring we’re guessing until the very last second as to whether The Jackal’s bullet will land true. But despite the updated tone and setting, The Day Of The Jackal manages to retain the paranoia-inducing tone of a ’70s thriller — a digital port that retains its analogue roots.

At nearly ten hours, this lacks the stripped-back precision of the original, but replaces that economy with richness of character, a more intricate plot, and an assortment of elaborate set-pieces, from a frantic Croatian car chase to a high-stakes Estonian concert hit and a horseback pursuit through the outskirts of Budapest. And while a few developments strain credulity and seem jammed in for the sake of pacing, the show never feels like it has outstayed its welcome. Both a pulse-quickening thriller and an antiheroic character study, this is the best TV Jackal since C.J. Cregg’s, and hits its mark with dead-eyed precision.