Sunday, December 15, 2024

(Not Quite) Better Late Than Never: The Day of The Jackal

 

 

I was aware after the Golden Globe nominations came out on Monday that I was going to have to start watching Day of The Jackal, Peacock’s new dramatic adaptation of the classic Frederic Forsyth spy novel about a sniper stalking a world leader. In less than one week both the Critics Choice Awards and the Globes had nominated both the series and Eddie Redmayne for top honors in television and the fact that it had just started its run as opposed to other series I will eventually get to that were nominated (Slow Horses and The Diplomat being the most prominent) I would have to spend less time catching up. I did not, however, expect it to make such an impression with me that quickly and for me to become an admirer very quickly.

The story has been adapted twice before, the first time by British filmmakers in a classic by Fred Zinnemann involved in fictionalized attempt Jackal’s attempt to assassinate Charles De Gaulle. A quarter of a century later we got the action version with Bruce Willis in the title role and Richard Gere playing an IRA informant tracking him down in a version that did little credit to any of the men involved. Now more than half a century after the original book was published the story gets the Peak TV adaptation it has deserved and it plays very much like the version we’ve deserved all this time.

Eddie Redmayne  has always had the ability to disappear into his characters whether he is playing a man who spends a week with Marilyn Monroe, Stephen Hawking or Tom Hayden. With his frail appearance you would not think there was a monster inside him but ever since I first encountered him as Antony Baekeland in Savage Grace, the heir to a plastics fortune who falls into depravity and murder, I’ve known the darkness that was beneath the surface. In his last major role in the Good Nurse we got a taste of it as he played Charlie Cullen, a nurse who no one suspected of being a serial killer. But his work as the Jackal takes it to a new level.

The opening teaser is a masterpiece as we see him learning how to mimic German so he can enter a newspaper as a cleaning man to commit a series of killings meant to lead a German minister out of hiding so he can assassinate him at the hospital the next day. We don’t see his real face until the teaser is over and he doesn’t even speak until half an hour has passed and even then he only says a few lines during the entire first episode. During the course of it he is offered a job by someone who has found him but insists on meeting him, something he does not do. He arranges the meeting, going to Sweden to encounter the representative Zina (Eleanor Matsuura). Zena represents a conglomerate who wants him to assassinate Ulle Dag Charles (The Crown’s Khalid Abdalla) a wealthy multi-billionaire who is the process of creating an app that he claims will create ‘total financial transparency.’

As you’d expect there are a group of evil white rich people in New York who want Charles dead and we’re pretty sure that Charles’s motivations are far from pure. The Jackal, refreshingly, doesn’t give a damn about why. When Zina attempts to explain the reasoning saying: “we’re patriots,” he tells “I give fuck-all why you want him dead.” That he might be the kind of man who can get the job done is clear; that they think he can just be handled is something they have clearly underestimated.

It’s not until the end of the episode that we realize another trick: the Jackal has a wife and baby son in Ibiza. (This is a nod to the original Carlos the Jackal.) Obviously his wife Nuria (Ursula Corbero) has not idea what her husband does for a living. What isn’t clear is whether or not the Jackal genuinely cares for Nuria or whether this is just another mask.

Like Colin Farrell Eddie Redmayne disappears into the Jackal but in this case it’s not prosthetics that hide who he is but rather a mask that is so solid Dexter Morgan would admire it. During the first two episodes the Jackal is double crossed by the client for the assassination in Munich and spends much of the second episode figuring out who it was and why. But there is never any outright expression of rage, no cursing, he never even raises his voice. And when he negotiates with Zina about how he can do his work, he talks as calmly as if he were haggling over a used car. It’s only there that the slightest trace of emotion enters his voice, in which he chooses to lecture Zina on how things are done in his world. He makes it very clear that his job is to kill this man “you’re paying me to get away”. He tells her that he doesn’t like to be hurried in his jobs and he is calm while Zina sounds slightly pressured. When they ask for a code name he says: “Why not the Jackal?” as if he couldn’t care less. You get to feeling he’s amused by these one percenters rather than afraid of them and that’s because for all their ability to seek him out, Zina is clearly afraid of him.

After the assassination takes place, MI-6 gets involved with the help of Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch). Pullman is an expert when it comes to ballistics and when she realizes just how far away the sniper was from his target she knows that theirs only one kind of gun that could possibly reach that far. She knows the gunmaker was ex-IRA and she has a source in Belfast that she believes can get her to him. The first two episodes show Bianca trying to find leverage on her source by going to her daughter and that goes balls-up very quickly. In the next episode she manages to get to Norman’s location which she believes is in Belarus only to find her and her team have been set-up. But Bianca is good at her job and after a bit of work she realizes that the man they are searching for is former British army and has sniper training – something that British intelligence really doesn’t like.

I’m not entirely thrilled with the effort to show us Bianca’s family life and the husband and daughter she leaves behind to go chasing after the world. I suspect; however, it’s done to parallel her with the Jackal’s life in Ibiza and the kind of trips he is constantly making across the globe for the same reasons with no explanation. Ironically, it’s clear at the start the Jackal’s relationship with his wife is far closer than that of the woman hunting him and that’s he doing a far better job keeping her safe from what he does than I suspect Bianca is for her.

Peacock is one of the newer streaming services available but in just a short amount of time it’s becoming a favorite of mine. It took very little time for me to fall in love with Poker Face last year and I’m waiting breathlessly for Season 2 to drop. I was also a huge fan of Apples Never Fall the most recent adaptation of a Lianne Moriarity novel and one of the more underrated limited series this past year. Now here comes Day of The Jackal a series  that has been renewed for a second season that perfectly inhabits the world explored by the original novel (much of the music and credits resemble early 1970s thrillers) with the kind of modern trappings that make it instantly watchable. Redmayne is certain to be among the frontrunners for an Emmy next year along with such talent as Gary Oldman and Pedro Pascal and there is a good chance the series could join their ranks.

Oh, and one more thing: my readers of my Criticizing Criticism series might remember that earlier this year I wrote a long article mocking what I read in The New Yorker about how a reviewer thought the most shocking thing that Frank Underwood ever did in House of Cards was kill a dog in the pilot. He ended that argument saying that if TV is dominated by streamers, it is highly unlikely we will ever see a show headed by a character who will kill a dog.

Well, not for nothing but a jackal is a member of the canine family and in the opening minutes of the first episode, he kills six people, including a German minister and blows up the hotel room he did the shooting from, killing at least four police, before going home to Ibiza and hugging his wife. And not for nothing while we knew what Frank Underwood was thinking because he told us his innermost turmoil, we have no clue at all at what’s going on behind the Jackal’s mind when he says F.U.  Eddie Redmayne scares the hell out of me in a way that Underwood never did even when he was pushing Zoe Barnes into an oncoming subway. And I have a feeling if he ever saw Underwood in person, he’d have no use for his prevarications, public or private, and have no problem taking a chunk out of him. This dog will hunt.

My score: 4.5 stars.

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