You always wonder when a novel that has already been made into a two-plus-hour film can be stretched into a ten-hour miniseries. If there’s any property that can be stretched out like that, though, it’s Fredrick Forsyth’s novel The Day Of The Jackal. A new limited series does just that, with the added advantage of having Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch in the lead roles.
THE DAY OF THE JACKAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: An older man repeats German phrases he’s recorded, in order to sound like the voice on the recorder.
The Gist: As we see, the man who looks like a grizzled old janitor is actually in complex makeup; he killed the actual grizzled old janitor in order to impersonate him. In Berlin, he goes into the headquarters of a media company headed by a man who is running for chancellor. After retrieving a hidden pistol, he shoots his way through the office until he reaches the man’s son. Instead of killing him, though, he shoots the man’s knee.
When he escapes and goes back to his rented flat, he takes off the makeup. We later learn that he’s an assassin called The Jackal (Eddie Redmayne). His goal wasn’t to kill the man’s son but to draw the mogul out; from far away from the hospital, he gauges the wind with a pinwheel, then disassembles his suitcase and reassembles it into a high-powered rifle. After a couple of test shots, he fires a high-precision shot that hits its target. He quickly turns the gun back into a suitcase, leaves an explosive gift for authorities to find, and leaves. He also blows up the car he uses to escape.
In London, MI6 agent Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch) hears about the shooting while home with her husband Paul (Sule Rimi) and teenage daughter Jasmine (Florisa Kamara). When she gets to work the next day, she sees that there is already a meeting with German intelligence underway. She finagles her way into meeting, because she’s a gun expert and knows she can help. Even though her supervisor passes a note to director Isabel Kirby (Lia Williams) that Bianca is a “pain in the arse,” Kirby is intrigued by Bianca’s description of a bespoke rifle made into a suitcase. She also has an asset in Northern Ireland that knows the person who may have made that rifle.
In the meantime, The Jackal makes his way to Paris, via a tightened down border that he passes through with only a little bit of difficulty. At a train station internet cafe, he logs into his dark web portal where he gets his jobs and payment. As he waits for his Berlin client to approve payment, someone else comes to him, offering $10 million for his services. The client (Eleanor Matsuura) wants to meet, something that The Jackal doesn’t do. So he negotiates an upfront payment just to meet. When he does talk to the client — he makes sure she doesn’t see him face-to-face — he finds out she wants him to kill tech guru Ule Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla), who promises to create apps that tells users where corporate money comes and goes.
When Bianca’s asset refuses to give the location of the rifle maker, MI6 brings in the woman’s daughter for questioning, on the pretense that she’s being arrested during a protest she leads. After throwing her in a holding cell, though, she’s found unresponsive.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Day Of The Jackal is created and written by Ronan Bennett (Top Boy), and based of Fredrick Forsyth’s 1971 novel of the same name. The book was also made into a film in 1973.
Our Take: The Day Of The Jackal is a pure cat-and-mouse game thriller, made deeper by the knowledge that both the chaser and the chasee have about their jobs. While there are plenty of side characters in this story, the success or failure is fully dependent on the performances of Redmayne and Lynch, and both expertly inhabit their characters, both of whom will likely have some outside motivations affecting their decisions.
For Redmayne’s Jackal, who seems to be pretty cool and emotionless about his job, he’s facing not only the opportunity to cash in on a huge job and retire, but he also needs to chase down payment for the Berlin job. For Bianca, she’s going to have to balance her pursuit of The Jackal while staying in contact with her family. Even as early as the first episode, she prioritizes talking to her source over a family function, and her daughter’s reaction to it tells us that it was far from the first time that happened.
While it doesn’t seem like a ton of plot takes place in the first episode, it certainly sets the scene to tell us about who the main players in the story are, and that certainly has us interested in seeing more.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: At his home in Spain, The Jackal logs onto his portal and follows up on the Berlin payment, which hasn’t arrived yet. All he gets is two lines: “FUCK. YOU.”
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Úrsula Corberó, who plays The Jackal’s wife Nuria. We’re curious as to how much she actually knows about what her husband does.
Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a scene in Stuttgart where Jackal buys a chess set. While the set becomes something that’s instrumental in the scene where he crosses the tightened border, we’re not sure why the scene where he buys the set is so long. Perhaps to show that he has hobbies?
Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re expecting a lot of tension and action in The Day Of The Jackal. The performances of Redmayne and Lynch give us hope that the tension can be sustained over 10 episodes, but we’re not sure if the intensity of the first episode can be maintained.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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