PRIME VIDEO - ON DEMAND - SERIES
How to explain the fortune that the profession of hitman in fiction is enjoying these days? Michael Fassbender (The Killer), Donald Glover and Maya Erskine (Mr & Mrs Smith) and Glen Powell (Hit Man) have done it (in jest, in the case of the latter) in all formats – feature film or series. The public's attraction to these technicians tasked with eliminating people they don't know surely stems from the spectacle guaranteed by the organization and execution of an assassination.
Perhaps, too, to the strange moral comfort offered by these economic transactions, whereby the killer's labor power is exchanged for a sum proportional to the victim's power to harm the sponsor. It's all just as rational and not much more (or less) shocking than the manufacture and distribution of health-damaging products such as cigarettes and cluster bombs.
So we're happy to spend 10 hours or so in the company of the Jackal, a brilliant representative of his guild. The point here is not to push the logic of assassination to the point of absurdity (like David Fincher in The Killer) or to dismantle the myth of the assassin (like Richard Linklater in Hit Man), but to return to the roots, to the time when the killer was both predator and prey, a threat to law and order and an agent of occult powers.
The success of The Day of the Jackal lies not so much in the spectacular violence of its bravura climaxes as in the effectiveness of a set-piece that most directors and actors who tackle the subject miss: Making the killer a human being whose personal fate ends up being more interesting than the success of his criminal enterprises. It took Eddie Redmayne to pull it off.
The series' credits may claim to be based on Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel, adapted for the screen two years later by Fred Zinnemann, but it superbly ignores the historical dimension of these works which evoked an assassination attempt on the person of Charles de Gaulle, perpetrated by a British man recruited by the OAS. This time, we discover the Jackal (Redmayne), in the 21st century, at work in Germany, where he must eliminate a politician of the right, or the far right, who cares? What's important, in terms of getting the story off the ground, is that Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch), an elite British counter-espionage agent, understands that the rifle used is the work of a Unionist arms manufacturer in Belfast, and that, consequently, the case also falls within the remit of Her Gracious Majesty's services.
You have 43.91% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.