Spoilers ahead for the season-one finale of The Day of the Jackal.
There was little chance The Day of the Jackal, Peacock and Sky’s remake of Fred Zinnemann’s classic 1973 thriller, was going to do its titular assassin dirty in the end, especially since it was already announced the hit series (now a Golden Globe nominee!) would be getting a second season. But that didn’t mean the season finale was going to be devoid of surprises. This is exactly what we got with the heart-pounding resolution to the cat-and-mouse game between Alexander Duggan (Eddie Redmayne), our debonair contract killer also known as the Jackal, and Bianca Pullman (Lashana Lynch), the MI6 agent pursuing him: a stand-off that ends with Duggan unceremoniously offing Pullman. It’s kind of an audacious choice to kill off a protagonist we spent the last ten episodes getting to know and perceiving as the Jackal’s moral counterweight, but it also underscored how unexpectedly interesting this modernization of The Day of the Jackal turned out to be.
Nobody was really asking for another take on Zinnemann’s film. Not even the remake’s own executive producer, Gareth Neame, who initially balked at the idea until, in his words, the “business imperative†kicked in (an incredible quote). The film was already reprised once with 1997’s The Jackal, starring Bruce Willis as the titular assassin and Richard Gere as the agent hunting him down, which was mostly terrible in the way dumb ’90s action flicks tended to be and never came close to touching the elliptical power of the original. A faithful adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel of the same name, Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal is a cool, cold picture, one that distantly watches as its titular assassin (Edward Fox) is contracted by the OAS, a far-right group opposing Algeria’s independence from France, to assassinate the French president Charles de Gaulle. Channeling the stylistic realism favored at the time, the film is quiet and matter-of-fact, toggling between the Jackal’s studious efforts to procure the identities, information, and tools he needs to carry out the job, and the French state’s operation, spearheaded by Deputy Commissioner Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale), to take down the guy. In other words, it’s a pure procedural. Critics compared the film’s starkness to a documentary; its dispassion mirrors the worldview of its assassin, who tells the OAS members recruiting him, “You simply can’t afford to be emotional. That’s why you’ve made so many mistakes.â€
Peacock and Sky’s The Day of the Jackal is the polar opposite of Zinnemann’s film in almost every way. Sure, there are familiar beats and threads: the unconventional rifle, the watermelon sequence, the Jackal projecting an intriguing air of aristocracy. But the serialized remake internalizes the streaming era’s disposition toward abundance and gives us more of everything: more hits, more action, more characters, more complications, and much, much more backstory. Redmayne’s Jackal is a classic haunted hardboi, a skilled former British sniper who turned on his country after witnessing his squad carry out war atrocities. Lynch’s Bianca Pullman is a dogged MI6 agent who burns anyone and everything to the ground, including her own family life, in search of her target. Even the Jackal’s target, Ulle Dag Charles (a half-hearted anagram of Charles de Gaulle), gets his own biographical beats. The guy is a genius tech entrepreneur and activist who threatens to turn the global power structure upside down by releasing an algorithm that would make all dark money public. His chief of staff also happens to be his lover.
It’s all so very extra, which is practically antithetical to the austerity that allows Zinnemann’s film to linger in the imagination. But it’s also really fun, and underlines how the more-more-more approach is actually what makes Peacock and Sky’s remake work so well. How can you watch Eddie Redmayne shape-shift into a variety of old men and not find it delightfully silly? This is a show where a client tries to blow off paying Redmayne’s Jackal, a world-class killer who literally just pulled off an impossible shot, by sending him an email that reads “Fuck you!!!†Compared to Zinnemann’s steely film, the series is so exorbitantly emotional it’s practically hysterical, but this is the trick that makes the remake work. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to re-create the elliptical power of the original in the format of a streaming series, so the answer here seems to be: Why not swerve far in the opposite direction?
Edward Fox’s Jackal is a cypher — an expression of some elemental darkness in the world — and this makes him alluring. We never learn where he’s from, what motivates him, how he learned his trade. All we know is that he’s a consummate professional. This blankness works for a self-contained film, but a shadow doesn’t make for the most compelling central character in a ten-part streaming series, and so Redmayne’s Jackal needs a double life, a Spanish wife, and a subplot where his dumb brother-in-law tries to get him to deal with a petty mobster. Of course, a lot of this is just bloat, and it all ultimately flies in the face of the underlying simplicity that drives the psychology between our dueling protagonists, seen in the final exchange between Duggan and Pullman when they face off in the former’s Spanish villa: “I just want to win,†the agent says. “So do I,†the Jackal responds.
And yet all that extravagant silliness doesn’t take away from the series’ political punch, which also comes as a surprise. A big part of what made the original 1973 film so sticky was the grounded nature of its political scenario. De Gaulle was a real world leader and the OAS was a very real organization; the world was also rolling off a decade that was particularly rife with political assassinations. This context, combined with its documentary style, lent a sense of realism to the events depicted in the film. By comparison, it’s hard to read much plausibility within the soap-operatic textures of Peacock and Sky’s The Day of the Jackal. Yet the series does find unexpected ways to effectively refurbish that punch for contemporary concerns, best reflected in that audacious ending.
Zinnemann’s film concludes with the French security state preventing the hit at the last minute: The Jackal shoots at de Gaulle, misses by sheer bad luck, and is killed when Lebel breaks down the door and guns him down. Geopolitical chaos is averted, which is good, because the stability of a political status quo is desirable, and you leave the film with the ambient sense of good people having done their jobs. Peacock and Sky’s The Day of the Jackal flows in the opposite direction. Though we’re more exposed to the Jackal’s humanity, he’s still working on the side of darkness. His target, Ulle Dag Charles, is a man who’s challenging the world order and the grave wealth inequality it has produced. His client is the existing Powers That Be, embodied by Charles Dance’s shadowy financier. Unlike Zinnemann’s film, Forsyth’s book, and the 1997 remake, this version sees the Jackal successfully pulling off the job, but he subsequently finds himself unknowingly locked in a scenario engineered by the British foreign minister, who we learn is working in cahoots with the Jackal’s client to eliminate both players so the hit stays untraceable. His stand-off with Pullman falls from this, and after he kills the agent, who had gone rogue after becoming disillusioned with MI6, he survives an attempt on his own life (naturally, because there’s another season to make).
The whole thing is deeply cynical: The elite power structure of capital and politics ultimately prevail, and on a meta level, the streaming remake gets to deepen its commitment to the “business imperative†that led its creation in the first place. But this ending also feels striking and appropriate for the times. Setting aside the uncanniness of a real-life CEO assassination taking place as episodes were still rolling out, the finale’s vibe captures a collective bitter feeling toward the systems of power in our own world. Peacock and Sky’s The Day of the Jackal might not be a terribly faithful adaptation of a stone-cold classic, but by expanding and exploding its source material, it coalesces into something altogether new — and produces a rip-roaring thriller that fully matches the sensibilities of its own era.