Eddie Redmayne in Peacock Thriller

The mountain lion that threatened Kim Bauer in the first season of Fox’s 24 was a feature, not a bug.

The ferocious feline, which probably still haunts Elisha Cuthbert’s dreams, was a proof of concept for how the groundbreaking series could extend its high thread across 24 hours a day. season: Not everything could be an A story or a B story. story, but in Jack Bauer’s world, even the filler was filled with tension.

Or at least it was theoretically. As even the most passionate fans will tell you, the detours were sometimes exciting, sometimes ridiculously entertaining, and sometimes just plain awful. But they served the purpose of prolonging the tension, and with 24extension was everything. Whatever pleasures the subsequent telefilm or two 12-part seasons provided, they made it clear that a condensed 24 can be many things, but it wasn’t 24.

There would have been no place for a cougar in Fredrick Forsyth’s 1971 novel, Day of the Jackalnor in Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 feature film. I hear the title and I think of a meticulous yet breathless game of cat-and-mouse, blessed with an austere purity of purpose: Will the killer known as the Jackal be able to carry out a complicated assassination or not?

By contrast, there’s plenty of room for cougars – at least metaphorical – in Peacock’s new 10-hour adaptation of Day of the Jackalcreated by Ronan Bennett (Top boy). It almost goes without saying that there’s a great two-hour movie in this Peacock series, or maybe even a great four-hour miniseries. But for the six episodes in the middle, the season cougars all the way down, as one digression after another keeps pulling at the seemingly fine thread that is the core plot.

Even with an understanding of the strategy and an appreciation of many other aspects of the show – including stars Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch, plus some exceptional European location shooting – the detours become a real drag in places. And equally “truncated” never felt right 24‘s brand, “sluggish” is not an ideal match for Day of the Jackal.

The British drama begins with Redmayne’s Jackal, only partially recognizable under layers of older makeup, performing an operation in Munich. As far as we can tell, the jackal is failing at his job. The truth is that the careful planner is just setting up a bigger kill – the assassination of a right-wing political figure, carried out via sniper rifle at a distance generally considered impossible.

It is the severity of the shooting that attracts the attention of MI6 agent Bianca Pullman (Lynch), a firearms expert with an academic husband (Sule Rimis Paul) and a teenage daughter (Florisa Kamaras Jasmine) whose mere presence means she will inevitably be put in danger.

Fresh from the German job, the Jackal is offered his biggest target yet. Tech billionaire Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla) is rolling out a new piece of software called River, basically designed to follow money trails, on the grounds that only through transparency will we see how nefarious corporate interests rule our lives.

Other rich people are obviously NOT happy. A shady consortium of oligarchs led by Timothy Winthrop (professional oligarch player Charles Dance), who leaves a lot of conservative talking points, wants the Jackal to put an end to Ulle Dag Charles and River both. The oligarchs insist that the Jackal be watched over by the mysterious Zina (Eleanor Matsuura, one of the few elements who gets better as the episodes go on), which he doesn’t appreciate.

Soon, Bianca is on the trail of the jackal and gets help and interference from her bosses, including Isabel (Lia Williams) and Osi (Chukwudi Iwuji), as well as dealing with the prospect of a mole in MI6 because Day of the Jackal hair been 24-ized to the nth degree.

Or maybe it has been James Bond-ized? Of course, Lynch faced a wave of pushback on racist Twitter (now simply known as “X”) when she was cast as the new 007 agent in No time to die. If you changed the title and added a “Broccoli” to the production list, this thriller could be a reasonable template for a TV spinoff, right down to Celeste’s opening credits song, “This Is Who I Am,” which would be an instant top ten Bond theme .

Especially in the first two and last two chapters, Day of the Jackal delivers both methodical intrigue – Bianca and the Jackal is admirably process-driven – and large-scale set pieces filmed in various European hubs, including London, Budapest, Croatia and more. There are shootouts, at least one big cobblestone car chase, and some carefully edited suspense sequences, all accompanied by a pervasive cynical attitude that keeps the show from feeling overly formulaic.

But the mid-season wheel-spinning is conspicuous. I guess Bennett would argue that this approach honors the world around our two protagonists and humanizes background characters who would be collateral damage in a shorter version of this tale. Adding dimension to e.g. the Northern Irish arms manufacturer (Richard Dormer, providing a jolt of midseason power) who supplies the Jackal with his nifty toys, or a beautiful Spanish woman (Úrsula Corberó, trying hard) with connections to the Jackal, presumably serves to remind that this is not a game for anyone on the periphery. Fair. I just didn’t need six hours. And for all the padding, Bianca still gets a partner (Nick Blood’s Vince) who is simply there for four or five acts without an individual voice or characterization or anything.

Nor has Ulle Dag Charles succeeded in coming across as a well-rounded character who exists to swim in the open water of the Adriatic and make enough vague but sanctioning statements about data transparency that it’s never clear whether he’s meant to we have to make sure he survives. . The idea of ​​having a tech billionaire as the Jackal’s target, rather than a global political leader, is an entirely worthy and accurate attempt to capture the zeitgeist of contemporary power. However, the execution feels like a shallow copy of a copy. There’s very little of the friction that actual closeness to reality would provide, to the point that this thriller comes out less than six months after an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate, yet doesn’t elicit a murmur of discomfort or recognition or resonance.

Rather than creating the sense that this premise could be real, viewers are more likely to come away with a sense that it has already been fictional – regardless of whether they compare Day of the Jackal to earlier adaptations of the same story, to 24 or to the countless other stories of apparent monastic murderers, from Le Samourai to David Fincher The killer.

The Jackal is nonetheless a role that plays to many of Redmayne’s strengths. Not every actor could make staring into the scope of a rifle infinitely convincing, but Redmayne brings his gift for infusing silence with intensity in scenes of the Jackal raining for wind or waiting for the right angle. While he brings the character to emotional life in performative bursts of humanity, my favorite thing about the entire series is that it doesn’t pretend, even for a second, that the Jackal does what he does for altruistic reasons or that he lives by a strict moral code. He kills people for money and prioritizes getting the job done, and the show accepts those instincts at face value.

That’s why the Jackal and Bianca are a good couple. Because she is an expert with a particular preoccupation, rather than a traditional spy, she operates without the elegance of spycraft. Lynch plays Bianca as perpetually irritated and ineffectively diplomatic. She’s not good at the part of the job that might leave a more socially minded agent thinking about personal or professional consequences, or a more traditional TV character worrying about likability or longevity. She is not thinking about another season.

Day of the Jackalbut thinking a bit about another season. I mention this not as a spoiler, but as a reflection of my own frustration at realizing that a narrative already stretched beyond its ideal limits would leave at least some aspects open. At one point, the ruthless efficiency I associate with Day of the Jackal is completely lost—leaving viewers trapped in a sea of ​​tertiary plotlines like so many fictional cougars in the hills above Los Angeles.