The Day of the Jackal
From
Rhino@21:1/5 to
All on Thu Nov 28 16:49:40 2024
A new version of The Day of the Jackal, a 1971 thriller by Frederick
Forsyth, was released recently. (A movie by the same name was made many
years back in 1973.) I've been making my way through the new version of
the story, having read the book a while back.
The story's central character is The Jackal, a mysterious hired assassin
who kills whoever he is paid to kill, provided the payday is high
enough. As the series begins, he infiltrates an office building in
Munich and shoots several people, most fatally, when a security guard
detects him. One of the people he has wounded is the son of a prominent
and controversial politician and is rushed to hospital. When the father
goes to visit him in hospital, the Jackal shoots him dead with a single
shot from an extremely long distance of 3 miles.
The German police contact their peers in their allied countries,
including the Brits, and one of their analysts, a gun expert, becomes instrumental in connecting The Jackal to Britain because she knows that
the only guy on earth who could make a sniper rifle of the kind he used
was a fellow Brit. She activates a source who knows how to find the
gun-maker and starts to track him down.
Meanwhile, The Jackal, played by Eddie Redmayne, turns out to have a
home life. He lives in Spain and has a wife and 2 year old son. The wife
has only a vague and inaccurate idea of what her husband does for a
living and her family, with whom she is close, are equally in the dark. However, his frequent and sudden disappearances for "work" have her
mother convinced he is having an affair behind her daughter's back. This
soon leads the wife and her kin to begin trying to uncover who her
husband really is.
I think that's enough to give you a sense of the story without spoiling
too much. There are 10 episodes in this series. I've just finished the
4th episode. According to Wikipedia, it has already been renewed for a
second season, which is a surprise to me: until a moment ago, I assumed
it was intended to be a "limited series".
By the way, if you've read the book, don't expect this series to be very similar, even though the original author is credited as a consulting
producer. It is set in the present day, not in the 1960s, and the people
being killed as well as the people hiring The Jackal are different. I
don't remember The Jackal having a family life at all in the book.
IMDB rates this first season at 8.1. I'm enjoying it.
--
Rhino
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