The Day of the Jackal Review: Who’d Be an International Assassin? The Stress!

In an apt summation of the current mood, MI6 agent Bianca Pullman is screaming the word “fuuuuuuucck” into a ravine. She’s on the tail of international assassin “the Jackal” and he’s proving elusive. After a night-time chase through a Budapest forest, Pullman has emptied her gun in the water he just leapt into from a height, but still didn’t get him. That’s because he’s the Jackal, a dead shot sniper and master of disguise so skilled that he can even pass for movie star Eddie Redmayne. 

Redmayne plays the Jackal in Top Boy-creator Ronan Bennett’s TV update of the Frederick Forsyth novel, which was adapted into a 1973 film now regarded as a classic. “Jackal” is the codename that Redmayne’s character gave himself, and a word Pullman (No Time to Die’s Lashana Lynch) Googles at the office when she first hears it. They’re resourceful hunters who live in isolation, she learns. Not this one.

Bennett adds to the source novel a wife and infant son for the Jackal, who’s better known to them as Charles/Papá. In the 10-episode season, Redmayne’s character goes by many names and many noses, all kept in a secret room at home along with his wig glue, fake passports and many thousands of pounds in various currencies. His wife (Money Heist’s Úrsula Corberó) has just started to look around their stunning Spanish hillside villa and wonder what her regularly absent, posh English husband does for a job. It’s a question that can’t lead anywhere good.  

What the Jackal does for a job is shoot people from very far away – so far away that firearms experts can’t believe that anybody could be that skilled or well equipped. The Jackal is both, as shown in a magnetic opening sequence that involves him transforming into an elderly German cleaner to set a trap for his next target. It is thrilling viewing, and the Scooby Doo-silliness of watching Redmayne pull off his old-man prosthetic face is almost entirely offset by how good he is at killing people. 

I say ‘good’, I should say ‘fucking terrifying’. There’s a Terminator-like efficiency to the speed at which Redmayne’s assassin puts bullets between the eyes of anybody who gets in his way. Pulling in middle-seven figures per commission, he’s well incentivized, but is it really all about the money? In other words, what’s this antihero’s origin story? Where did he learn to do his own Mrs Doubtfire wigs and make-up – Am Dram? The 1970s film didn’t go there, but this extended TV version promises to scuff up the character’s surface to see what’s underneath.

It can’t just be about the money, because the Jackal is already swimming Scrooge McDuck-style through piles of the stuff. That landscaped villa alone would be enough for most people to hang up their spurs and live out the rest of their days in beauty, comfort and the security of having enough set aside to fund their ornithology hobby (the Jackal’s a bird watcher). It’s not enough for him. He’s after one last mega pay-off, he promises his still-in-the-dark wife, and then he’ll retire.

That’s if Pullman doesn’t get him first. Lynch’s firearms specialist is similarly scary in pursuit of her goals. She’ll lie, manipulate and sacrifice whomever needs sacrificing to advance her op. This determination makes her a fearsome intelligence agent but an unreliable parent. (The show also follows her home, where we see her fail to show up for parents’ evenings or show due interest in her daughter’s moussaka.) 

Pullman’s doggedness puts pressure on the Jackal, leading to several pulse-raising action sequences from director Brian Kirk, in which the lead showcases his range of talents: stunt driving, bomb-making, the sporting of a jaunty neckerchief… He also has a 007-like stash of tech gadgets to enable his craft and swift getaways. If you ooh over gun barrels, then prepare to ooh.

Plot-wise, we follow the Jackal’s preparations for the big payoff job. We also meet an artisanal firearms manufacturer (Richard Dormer), his enforcer brother, a cabal of one percenters led by Charles Dance, plus a tech billionaire (Khalid Abdalla) poised to release software that will render the world’s global financial transactions transparent. There’s also an MI6 mole to identify, and the Jackal’s numbskull brother-in-law to keep an eye on. There’s no shortage of stuff going on, to sum up. This is neither a slow-burner nor a philosophical exploration – it’s first and foremost an action show.

On that note, the locations are far-flung and varied, and the soundtrack, clothes and cars are cool. As the season goes on, there’s the odd drop of Slow Horses-style humour, but mostly it takes itself very seriously – no mean feat when plot points revolve around the Jackal disguising himself with a bald cap and a fedora to go and check his bank account. 

Whether The Day of the Jackal provides a decent explanation for why the title character would go to all this raised blood pressure fuss when he could be sipping local sherry in sunny Cadiz with his hot wife and chubby baby, is almost beside the point. TV loves watching cool characters doing cool things while looking cool, which appears to have been this show’s MO. 

The Day of the Jackal airs on Thursdays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic. It comes to Peacock in the US on November 14.