Liverpool Sound and Vision 9/10
Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Lashana Lynch, Chuckwudi Iwuji, Lia Williams, Úrsula Corberó, Charles Dance, Corey Johnson, Eleanor Matsuura, Ben Hall, Jon Arias, Khalid Abdalla, Sule Rimi, Florisa Kamara, Nick Blood, Christy Meyer, Adoney Díaz Barajas, Saúl Díaz Barajas, Patrick Kennedy, Martin McDougall, Puchi Lagarde, Patrick O’Kane, Jonjo O’Neill, Kate Dickie, Adam James, Gerard Kearns, Russell Balogh, Richard Dormer, Andreas Jessen, Laura Checkley, Lucas Englander, Jan-Martin Müller, Péter Kálloy Molnár, Brian Caspe, Eddie Elks, Thomas Mraz, Philip Jackson, Michelle Newell.
The resilience of the modern writer and television executive in converting and reimagining the past glories of various genres on screen is often either taken for granted as a hit, and then fails to deliver to the changing attitudes of the day, or left finding itself bereft and unloved, unable to connect with the ideas and concepts of what made the premise a hit in the first place. Only occasionally does a series or a film from another period transfer truly successfully to the current age.
The entanglement of emotions when confronted by such an enlightening moment is one designed to confuse and push the viewer to a place where they empathise readily with the character on screen and in a world that has become visually morally ambiguous, to side with the one of the most intriguing villains of cinematic history is to understand that the series absolutely works on every level conceived.
The 2024 television serial of Day Of The Jackal takes Frederick Forsyth’s immensely popular and riveting novel to a whole new level of representation, and whilst it keeps loosely to the original visual version which captured the dynamic of Edward Fox, Terence Alexander, and Michel Auclair in their framing of assassins and their brief, it is in this terrific version by Christopher Hall that the novel perhaps becomes a towering repository of just how the mind of the mechanically driven and obsessed hit man works tirelessly to achieve their aims.
The presence of Eddie Redmayne as The Jackal might have originally raised eyebrows, especially in some of the scenes which ask more of the actor than a notion of how far a dispassionate dispatcher of souls might go to, it is to his credit, as well as Lashana Lynch, Chuckwudi Iwuji, Lia Williams, and Úrsula Corberó, that the ten-part series works with sheer intense myopia, the narrowing of movement, the boundaries crossed, the ingenuity of the kill, and as each moment passes the more the sublimely constricting the event becomes.
One of the most impressive adaptions of a novel to have been brought to the attention of the viewer, Day Of The Jackal cuts through the deceit and tough complications and delivers a premise that asks the audience to attach empathy to such a divisive character, to revel in the actions of a man whose back story fills the screen with compassion, and one to whom perhaps Eddie Redmayne achieves the kind of precision that he was destined to.
A tremendous achievement in production and suspense, the attention to detail and the modern enforcing of principals and manifesting capitalist evil disguised as moral compass is exhilarating; Day Of The Jackal is essential viewing.
Ian D. Hall