The Day Of The Jackal takes every Bond cliche and makes it dazzle again to be ‘cool as Connery, charming as Moore, deadly as Craig’, says CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

The Day of the Jackal (Sky Atlantic)

Judgement:

An open-top sports car on a road along the Mediterranean Sea. At the wheel is a young woman with wavy hair and a light of love in her eyes – next to her a ruthless assassin.

In this sensational remake of The Day Of The Jackal, Eddie Redmayne takes every cliché from the James Bond film and gives it a shine and a twist to make it dazzle again. Urban, sardonic, inscrutable and old-fashioned… cool as Connery, charming as Moore, deadly as Craig.

This isn’t just the best TV thriller since The Night Manager. It’s also Redmayne who claims to be the next 007 and blows away all the competition.

Only one question remains: is he too red to be Bond?

This isn’t just the best TV thriller since The Night Manager. It’s also Redmayne who claims to be the next 007 and blows away all the competition

Screenwriter Ronan Bennett is clearly a lover of classic thrillers, having transported Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 bestseller into the 21st century without losing any of its original character. He creates car chases and stakeouts, gunfights and explosions, political squabbles and terrorist violence.

If, like me, you believed that intelligent, high-octane action series were no longer possible in a waking world, then The Day Of The Jackal proves us wrong.

The novel is known to have become a handbook for would-be assassins, due to its meticulous descriptions of ‘craftsmanship’, and this adaptation is true to the Forsyth style.

We see every step of the Jackal’s preparations for each assassination, starting with an ambush on an office. To get in, Redmayne’s character – we never know his name – not only disguises himself as the grouchy janitor, but also imitates his accent and repeats his crabby grumbling.

What at first glance seems like a simple assassination task turns out to be anything but. The job has a series of shocking twists, but every time we think the killer has been misled, it turns out he has planned it this way.

Even when he appears to be cornered on the roof of a tower block with the police gathered below, he has all the smoke bombs and rappelling ropes he needs to escape. And that’s all before the opening credits appear.

The Jackal is an amoral superman. He kills for money and, as he tells his clients, he has no interest in why they want their enemies dead.

But in this retelling (unlike the 1973 film starring Edward Fox) he is also a devoted family man, with a Spanish wife, a one-year-old son and an estate in rural Cadiz.

Lynch has to work hard to keep us from hating her. She bullies and betrays Alison, while continually abandoning her own family

The novel is known to have become a handbook for would-be assassins, due to its meticulous descriptions of ‘craftsmanship’, and this adaptation is true to the Forsyth style.

Charles Dance, as a particularly shady billionaire named Timothy Winthorp, is so eager to get rid of this app for good that he sends an underling to hire the Jackal’s services for $100 million.

His adoring partner Nuria, played by Ursula Corbero, is fiery and filled with jealous suspicion, adding a realistic layer of complexity to the Jackal’s coolly rational methods.

In the book, his ultimate target is French head of state Charles de Gaulle. It’s clear that Sky Atlantic isn’t going to make a series about a plot to assassinate France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron – on the one hand, it would be in bad taste, and on the other, no one would care enough to keep watching.

This time, the man in focus is a figure in the form of Elon Musk, a tech entrepreneur named Ulle Dag Charles or UDC (Khalid Abdalla). He is developing an app that promises complete transparency in banking so that financial transactions cannot be hidden. This, he says, will create “global economic justice.”

Personally, I don’t see that software catching on. You don’t have to be a shady billionaire to feel like the world doesn’t need to know how you earn or spend every cent.

Charles Dance, as a particularly shady billionaire named Timothy Winthorp, is so eager to get rid of this app for good that he sends an underling to hire the Jackal’s services for $100 million. This leads to a series of meetings that never take place completely face-to-face. The killer’s first greeting is invariably: “Don’t turn around.”

Hot on his trail is British intelligence expert and weapons nerd Bianca (Lashana Lynch, who co-starred in the last Bond film, No Time To Die). She carries with her echoes of Killing Eve: a strong-willed woman within MI6, conflicted about the morality of her job, but so committed to it that she drives her husband away.

Bianca must answer to a female supervisor whose lack of emotion is thoroughly psychopathic, and a department head (Chukwudi Iwuji) who couldn’t look more like a mole if he had whiskers and velvet fur.

His adoring partner Nuria, played by Ursula Corbero, is fiery and filled with jealous suspicions, adding a realistic layer of complexity to the Jackal’s coolly rational methods.

No one at MI6 wants to hear that the killer terrorizing Europe is probably a former British Army soldier, or that his gun appears to be a British prototype. But Bianca is determined to prove this by blackmailing the wife of a loyalist thug in Belfast and jailing her daughter.

Writer Bennett, born in Belfast, was imprisoned in the 1970s for his suspected involvement in an IRA murder and armed robbery (before his conviction was overturned). There is a brutally convincing realism to the scenes in which Bianca confronts the scared, embittered Alison (Kate Dickie) in a clothes shop in town, and her subsequent attempts to get the information MI6 needs.

Lynch has to work hard to keep us from hating her. She bullies and betrays Alison, while continually abandoning her own family. Only the fact that she cannot forgive herself allows us to excuse her.

But it’s not hard to admire the Jackal – Redmayne is so thoroughly English, with a touch of friendliness and a touch of self-mockery that prevents his infallibility from becoming an annoyance.

Some of his murders are utterly brutal, but we can see that he gets no satisfaction from them: they’re just part of the job and, as Paul McCartney sang about Bond: ‘He’s gonna do it right… he’s gonna give the other guy hell.’

And what’s the next job? It could easily be from His Majesty’s secret service.