‘The Day of the Jackal’ series review: Eddie Redmayne sears the screen in this Frederick Forsyth update

How is it that Eddie Redmayne’s name has never come up for James Bond? Watching his turn as the cold, ruthless assassin in The Day of the Jackal, Throwing sinuous coils of deception on those chasing him and his clients, he seems tailor-made to take the secret agent with a license to kill in wholly new and unexpected directions.

The Day of the Jackal is an update of the eponymous 1971 Frederick Forsyth novel detailing a fictitious plot to kill the French president, Charles de Gaulle. An anonymous British assassin, codenamed Jackal, is hired to do the job. The Jackal misses his target by a hair’s breadth when de Gaulle bends to kiss the cheek of a veteran. Inspector Claude Lebel, who is on the Jackal’s trail, catches up with his quarry, and the two acknowledge each other with grudging respect before Lebel shoots the assassin dead.

Fred Zinnemann adapted the novel into a film in 1973 with Edward Fox as the Jackal. And now more than 40 years later, we have a 10-episode series, which is as gripping as the spare novel and film. The Day of the Jackal set the template for all those cold-blooded nameless assassins that populate our screens from David Fincher’s The Killer to Knox Goes Away and “don’t mess with my dog ​​or car” John Wick.

Much of the thrill of The Day of the Jackal was in how the Jackal set about his job, including getting a false passport (through a loophole that was open till 2007), meeting his gunsmith, and his various disguises. Forsyth said in an interview, if set in today’s world, The Day of the Jackal would be a short book thanks to advances in technology!

One of the strengths of the show is its seamless updates. While more characters and subplots have been introduced, the show does not sag under their weight. It moves along smoothly anchored by Redmayne’s extraordinary turn and to a lesser extent by Lashana Lynch as Bianca, the MI-6 agent doggedly on the Jackal’s tail.

The Jackal, in his identity as a rich Englishman, Charles Calthrop, has a wife, Nuria (Úrsula Corberó), and a sweet toddler, Carlito, in Cadiz, Spain, Nuria’s good-for-nothing brother, Alvaro (Jon Arias), wants to use his brother-in-law’s money for hare-brained schemes. Bianca faces flak from the department for the way Jackal seems to get away, though MI6 Deputy Chief of Staff, Isabel Kirby (Lia Williams), is supportive. Edward Carver (Jonjo O’Neill) investigates the department for a mole.

A still from ‘The Day of the Jackal’

Things are not so good at home for Bianca either, as her college professor husband, Paul (Sule Rimi), and daughter Jasmine (Florisa Kamara), feel they are not as important to Bianca as her job. Bianca is shown to be not above manipulating people including grieving parents. There are call-backs for those who are familiar with the book, including the names of Jackal’s aliases, Calthrop and Alexander Duggan. Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla), the tech billionaire and the Jackal’s latest target, is often called UDC quite like De Gaulle was referred to as CDG.

Apart from the considerable thrills, chases, near-misses and shootouts, The Day of the Jackal is great fun for the globetrotting where action moves from the dusty plains of Afghanistan and the burnt hues of Spain, to Munich, the brilliant blue sea of ​​Croatia, the shadowy boardrooms of London and New York and the wilderness of Belarus.

While Redmayne owns the Jackal, being at once formidable and fragile, blinking his blond eyelashes in the sun like a vulnerable nocturnal animal caught in the light, it is excellent to see Charles Dance being his coolly wicked self as the Jackal’s employer. The music is excellent and all the songs from The Who’s ‘Won’t get Fooled Again’ and Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’ to alt-J’s ‘Tessellate’ are on my Liked songs list.

The announcement of the show being renewed for a second season reduced the tension of the final showdown a bit, but all in all The Day of the Jackal is a splendidly bingeable round-the-world thriller from the James Bondesque opening credit song (Celeste’s ‘This Is Who I Am’) to the inevitable cliffhangers at the end.

The Day of the Jackal streams on JioCinema