Eddie Redmayne’s globe-trotting assassin thriller on TVNZ is worth putting your phone down for.
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This is a vulnerable thing to say as someone who often writes about television for a job, but boy am I really struggling to stay engaged with television these days. The slightest moment of confusion or boredom and I am lured back to my phone to enjoy thousands of videos of llamas pretending to sing emo songs, memes about the trials of rescue dog ownership, and group chats oozing with gossip. How could Industry ever compete?
Last week I interviewed veteran television reviewer Diana Wichtel for My Life in TV (coming tomorrow), and it turns out that even she struggles with her attention span and second-screening. Wichtel described us all as so “culturally drenched” nowadays that retaining interest and even basic information about a TV show is harder than ever (even Thee Diana Wichtel once watched a whole season of a show before realising she’d already seen it).
But in this swamp of confusion and distraction, every now and again a TV show grabs you by both ears and wrenches you out of the social media muck, sometimes even demanding that you binge watch episode after episode while the llamas on Instagram sing to an empty crowd. TVNZ’s new spy thriller The Day of the Jackal is that kind of show, and the perfect factory reset button to hit if you are looking for utterly riveting and utterly ridiculous thrills.
Starring Eddie Redmayne as a high-flying assassin, who hilariously insists on being called “Jackal”, The Day of the Jackal follows him around the globe as he evades capture from the shit-hot MI6 agent Bianca (Lashana Lynch) chasing his fluffy Jackal tail. Already known for being a chameleon (sometimes pushing his ambitions too far), Redmayne’s unnerving and slightly alien energy works perfectly as he adopts endless disguises and personas on the job.
For example, the jaw-dropping opening sequence (which reminded me a lot of the spectacle and rubbery faces of The Dark Knight opener) features Redmayne going incognito as an old German janitor. Soon enough it becomes clear that he’s packing more than mops in his cleaning cart, as he carries out an unwieldy assassination with mucho collateral damage. But it’s his next victim – killed by a single shot from two miles away – that gets the attention of Bianca at MI6.
So begins a worldwide game of cat and mouse, where the cat is a world-leading expert in arms and ammunition, and the mouse has a world-leading collection of transformative bald caps. Both are so addicted to their top secret jobs that their family life suffers – in episode one, we find out that The Jackal has a Mrs Jackal and a Junior Jackal holed up in a Mediterranean mansion somewhere, and Bianca has to miss a parent-teacher meeting to pursue a Jackal-related lead.
Where Mr and Mrs Smith, another spy thriller rebooted for the streaming age, chose to pack the script with modern witty repartee, Jackal is stone cold serious. Sometimes that leads to moments of unintentional comedy, such as when the Jackal meets a potential client looking like one of the three blind mice from Shrek. Other times, plot points and character decisions don’t entirely make sense, or are just absolutely ridiculous (why would you stash all of that in your marital home?).
Watching The Day of the Jackal reminds me of being glued, mouth agape, to the Idris Elba mile-high thriller Hijack last year. Huge budget, huge movie star, huge stupendous story that would probably, if we’re honest, work better as a movie. But given that Jackal is reportedly the most expensive production ever made by Sky in the UK, I suppose they have to put all that cash somewhere. And if it continues to keep me off my phone for even an hour, that’s probably money well spent.