The Day of the Jackal will have you drooling

All the previewers have been drooling lasciviously over The Day of the Jackal reboot and, having seen the first three episodes, I quite understand why. This is coffee-table spy-drama porn perfectly calculated to satisfy all manner of lurid and exotic tastes.

There’s sniper-rifle-assembly porn; foreign-property porn (the Jackal’s gorgeous mountain retreat near Cadiz with a to-die-for infinity pool); fashion-nostalgia porn (especially the brown suede jacket worn with a red neckerchief in homage to the original, starring Edward Fox); far-right German politician’s head exploding in a pink mist as the heavy caliber sniper round reaches the end of its remarkable, unprecedented two-and-a-half-mile trajectory porn.

Even if you’re not a fan of Redmayne, he is perfect in the title role as a fashionable killer with a double life

Essentially this is The Night Manager with a slightly different plot and a different Old Etonian as the lead — Eddie Redmayne instead of Tom Hiddleston — but with a similarly satisfying mix of locations (Munich, Belarus, Spain, London, Belfast, New York, etc.), expensive hotels and cafés, tense plotting and a light spray of gore. (The Night Manager, can you believe, came out as long ago as 2016, since when there has been nothing in this genre quite as good.)

Even if you’re not a fan of Redmayne (which I wasn’t until this), he is perfect in the title role as a fashionable killer with a double life. At weekends, he’s the devoted, gentle, endearingly coy lover of his pretty Spanish girlfriend Nuria (Ursula Corbero) and father to a son with the improbably-clichéd name Carlito. During the week, he travels round the world blowing people’s heads off with his bespoke sniper rifle which can be disassembled to look like a briefcase you could easily get past airport security.

This side of the show is by far the most enjoyable. OK, so he’s a ruthless assassin but, as with Fox’s 1973 character, you can’t help rooting for him because he is so suave, elegant and amazingly good at his job. He can speak German like a native; he’s a master of disguise; he doesn’t look like one of those vulgar show-offs who spend too much time in the gym, yet he’s perfectly capable of abseiling down an exploding apartment building into a smoke bomb when the need arises. Also, he has hinterland: when not spying through his sniper scope, he’s using all that expensive optical equipment on his other hobby, watching eagles in their nests and ducks on lakes and such like. Plus, he collects rare chess pieces: how niche is that?

Still, there’s a problem with this series and no one else is going to mention it because they will be afraid of sounding sexist but I don’t care because it needs to be said. The parallel plot line about the MI6 officer on a mission to catch him just doesn’t work. Partly this is because you know that, in real life, if there were an English sniper of the Jackal’s calibre MI6 would already know about him because he’d be working for them. Mainly, though, it’s because the Jackal’s nemesis is Bianca (Lashana Lynch).

Here are some of the things that we are expected to believe about Bianca in order to invest in her character. She is a fantastically obsessive gun-nut familiar with all the world’s small arms down to the finest detail. She has an undefined job which seems to involve hanging around the Vauxhall HQ largely unknown and ignored till an international assassin emerges on the scene and — boom! — she has a function. Somehow (totally inexplicably so far) she has had extensive special forces training which means that she is authorized to lead undercover armed raids into hostile territory. MI6, furthermore, is so obsessed with this sniper that they will breach any and all protocols in order to give this charmless zealot free rein.

Even more preposterous is her domestic life. Neither her amiable university lecturer husband nor her model pupil daughter seems yet to have twigged that she has a secretive, high-pressure job which requires her continually to miss school parents’ evenings and to leave halfway through cozy dinner parties for urgent unexpected engagements. But she has been doing this job for years. How are they not used to it by now?

This series would have made much more sense as a Heat-style scenario in which both the main characters — the cop and the crook — were played by men, because that is just how the world is. Also, if, as my friend Mark Millar says, screen drama moves in cycles, then I think we are seriously overdue the rejection of this utterly nonsensical trope whereby female leads in movies are just like men only tougher, better at hand-to-hand combat and more deadly with firearms.

I would have expected a bit more verisimilitude from writer Ronan Bennett, whose Top Boy series I loved. But maybe that’s the deal when you write for streaming services: the DEI is non-negotiable.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.