Superb Day of the Jackal remake is one of the best TV shows of the year

The Day of the Jackal, Binge/Foxtel
★★★★★

Anyone who remembers the masterful 1973 film about a master assassin and a plot to kill French President Charles de Gaulle (a plot inspired by real events in 1962) will fear the worst from this new adaptation. But rest easy. While it’s not faithful to the details of the plot, it is utterly in the spirit of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel – both in the tale and its attention to detail. And the result is simply one of the best TV shows of the year.

Eddie Redmayne plays an assassin and master of disguise in The Day of the Jackal. Credit: Marcell Piti/Binge/Foxtel

The assassin (Eddie Redmayne) gives himself the codename Jackal when hired by a shadowy group to take out tech entrepreneur Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla). UDC, as he is known by an adoring public, has written a piece of software called River, with which he promises to lay bare the financial dealings of the world’s richest people. Yes, he’s among them, but he has nothing to hide, he tells a TV interviewer. The people who want him dead, and River blocked, can’t say the same thing.

Intriguingly, there are shades of Elon Musk about UDC, but as with so many other elements here, the political element has been flipped on its head.

That the Jackal is the real deal is established in the first episode, when he lands a bullet to the brain of his target from the seemingly impossible distance of 3815 metres. That he is motivated by money rather than ideology is attested by the fact his target is a right-wing populist leader (Edward Fox’s killer in 1973 was in the employ of right-wing nationalists).

An unrecognisable Redmayne in one of the Jackal’s many disguises.Credit: Marcell Piti

Created and written by Ronan Bennett, a Northern Irishman who was once imprisoned on a murder charge (later overturned when the verdict was deemed unsafe) and later worked for Jeremy Corbyn, this Jackal is infused with a sense of real-world modern-day politics, police work and a pressing sense of urgency.

That said, there’s some of the Ripley about it, too, with the accretion of detail as important as the intermittent bursts of action.

Across the five episodes (of 10) made available for preview, Redmayne’s Jackal is as much actor as assassin. A master of accents, languages and disguises, he has a secret chamber in which his latex, loot and fake passports (dozens of them, unlike the original’s three) stand ready for the next assignment, or a quick getaway.

But he has a domestic life, too, to which he claims to want to retire: a villa in the hills outside Cadiz in southern Spain; a beautiful Spanish wife, Nuria (Ursula Corbero); a cute two-year-old son.

But Nuria’s curiosity about where her husband keeps disappearing to – and her burning suspicion that he’s having an affair – could be as much of a threat to his viability as the relentless pursuit of MI6 agent Bianca (Lashana Lynch), a woman who has to outsmart her own managers as well as her target if she is to stop him, and whose methods are scarcely less brutal than his.

There are inevitably shades of the muscular espionage thriller about all this – echoes of Jason Bourne and Daniel Craig-era James Bond in some of the tech, weaponry and general inventiveness. But there’s little of the sense of invincibility of those pseudo-superhero spies.

This Jackal makes mistakes, he leaves a trace, he skates close to the edge. The genius of the show is you’re never quite sure whether you want him to plummet or to fly.

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