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The Day of the Jackal’s Final Hit Packs a Punch
The streaming remake’s audacious ending is both deeply cynical and strikingly appropriate for the times.
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. 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. 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.
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