The original post: /r/television by /u/catbus_conductor on 2025-02-23 05:40:19.
I was really looking forward to this show and it tries very hard to create some kind of Bond-esque grandeur and gravitas with the opening song, the beautiful European locations and all the music montages, but it never ends up earning it and just feels like a badly written BBC show in the end.
Most egregiously, I think this depiction of the Jackal fundamentally just doesn’t work. In Forsythe’s novel and the film adaptations, he is a shadowy loner that we end up knowing very little about. His morals and motivations remain ambiguous. Here, they try to write him as a conflicted, even sympathetic protagonist that has a compassionate side and attempt to give him a moral justification for turning bad with the war crimes stuff. That just makes it seem like they didn’t have the balls to really commit to having the show revolve around a genuinely amoral or villainous character for 10 episodes, and the portrayal ends up feeling contradictory and aimless. This is a writing issue of course - I can still appreciate Redmayne putting in genuine effort to sell it as much as he can, he does a good job.
The family drama on both sides is just obnoxious and in the case of the Jackal, completely ridiculous. Why would a guy like this even take the risk of having a family on the side, and then on top of it keep all his incriminating evidence right at home? Bianca (the agent) doesn’t fare much better, especially given her ultimate fate. It’s total soap opera filler that wasn’t in the book and takes up large parts of the show with little justification.
In the original novel, the actual assassination plot was set among a quite realistic political context of the time and was quite believable. Here it’s this cartoonish conspiracy about a techbro billionaire who has a sudden epiphany to become the savior of the unwashed masses so he creates some vaguely outlined magical software which, uh…shows what the evil rich people around the world are really doing or something? It’s never coherently explained, completely cringe and wastes Charles Dance by having him sit in an office mustache twirling for the entire show while we don’t even get to know what he actually does.
Then there’s the numerous plot contrivances, really too many to count. Unlike the original, the Jackal leaves a trail of large scale destruction and obvious clues wherever he goes, by the time we get to the end and he’s setting every car he leaves behind on fire (which would beget more attention, not less) it basically feels like a Monty Python sketch.
Too bad. I was hoping this would reach the heights of previous high budget Sky/BBC miniseries like ZeroZeroZero and The Night Manager but it doesn’t come anywhere close.