An action thriller from Director Michael Caton-Jones about a former IRA solider helping the FBI track down an infamous international assassin. Stars Richard Gere, Bruce Willis and Sidney Poitier (in his final film role).
If there's one thing people aren't getting from the modern age of on-demand streaming, it's the mild thrill of flipping through TV channels and happening across a movie that's just started. Many a night of channel surfing in my youth was upended by the sound of the Universal Pictures intro or the 20th Century Fox opening fanfare, a sudden invitation to drop all the nothing I was doing and spend two hours watching "Remember the Titans" (2000) or "Deja Vu" (2006). Or any number of other vaguely appealing Denzel Washington vehicles.
These films, importantly, were usually nothing special. They were forgettable works, missteps in the filmography of some popular actor. But even so, there was something uniquely charming about coming across one late at night and seeing how far in you could get before nodding off.
These experiences have largely faded now, replaced by the lesser thrill of Netflix auto-playing a film three seconds after you finished the last one as if it can stun-lock you into endless consumption. However, every now and then, I'll watch something that feels like a perfect fit for that late night, broadcast TV era, and there is perhaps no better example than 1997's "The Jackal."
"The Jackal" is the loose, often forgotten remake of 1973's "The Day of the Jackal" (itself an adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel). It follows Bruce Wilis as as the titular "Jackal," a stoic hitman hired by the Russian mafia to carry out a political assassination in the United States. This premise is an immediate diversion from the original story, which followed an attempt to assassinate the President of France, and both Forsyth and Fred Zinnemann (the director of the original film) disavowed it as being entirely unrelated.
These changes to the story, questionable as they were, plant the later film firmly in the politics and technology of the 1990s. Bruce Willis's "Jackal" is a high-tech assassin, utilizing everything from cyber cafes and stereos to chemical posions and remote-controlled machine guns. The only thing he does carry over from his 70s counterpart is a penchant for clever disguises, creating four or five distinct personas that he switches between over the course of his mission. These disguises are an interesting wrinkle to the Jackal character, but like every interesting element in the movie, it is immediately counterbalanced by something dull, namely Willis's performance.
For an eccentric, globetrotting assassin, Willis's Jackal has surpisingly little to chew on. He is portrayed throughout most of the film as stoic, quiet and unflinching, only to ramp up into a wild-eyed madman when confronting Richard Gere's character in the third act. This is a bad fit for an actor that thrived on charismatic dialogue in earlier films like "Die Hard" (1988) and "The Fifth Element" (1997). By contrast, Gere is given more of an emotional hook for his character, and the result is much more compelling... if you ignore the accent.
The other half of the film's screentime is taken up by the American FBI and Russian MVD tracking down the Jackal and attempting to thwart the assassination, which they believe is aimed at the Director of the FBI. With no other leads on the the mysterious killer's identity, they turn to one of the few living people that has ever seen his face, the incaracerated IRA sniper, Declan Mulqueen (played by Richard Gere).
Gere is much more enjoyable to watch as the weary, roguish hero than Willis is as the villain, both because of and in spite of his terrible Irish accent. He seemingly knows that he can't maintain the accent when speaking too loudly, so the majority of his dialogue is delivered in a noticeably muted tone. Combined with Willis's performance, "The Jackal" might have set a record for the lowest average decibel level in an action movie.
After striking a deal with Sidney Poitier's character, Mulqueen is released into FBI custody to aid in the hunt for the Jackal. This beat, which happens about twenty minutes into the film, is placed far too late, giving the audience no time to warm up to Gere before thrusting him into some very emotionally heavy scenes. He leads the FBI/MVD group to Isabella (played by Mathilda May), his former love that was shot by the Jackal during some previous adventure in Libya. Isabella is now married with children in the United States, leading to a strained but tender reunion between her and Mulqueen. This scene in particular, while well acted, suffers from Mulqueen's late introduction, and the result is an unsatisfying narrative beat that could have worked if the early scenes were arranged differently.
The film does even out after this point, splitting time evenly between Willis and Gere while their cat-and-mouse game leads them across the country. The two don't appear in the same scene until around the one hour mark, and their total screentime together is very short, which could be an interesting quality if not for how the two leads spend their time apart. Willis, in particular, has several scenes that are virtually pointless, including an interaction with a forger that achieves the rare cinematic feat of being completely devoid of tension or conflict. He walks in, picks up his newly forged IDs, pays the forger extra for her great work, and then says "I hope your baby's doing well" before heading off. That's it. That's a minute-long scene in a Hollywood movie.
These elements might make "The Jackal" seem like a complete dud of a movie, but it somehow finds ways to balance out both the good and the bad. The characters have clear arcs, there is proper foreshadowing, setups and payoffs, and the film does build to a proper climax inside the tunnels of the Washington Metro. Every bad performance is matched by a decent one; every awkward piece of dialogue is offset by interesting music or cinematography. It's perfectly balanced (as all things should be), and if it were ever to come on late at night while you were surfing channels on your TV, you might leave it on just long enough to lull you to sleep.
For our original review of "The Jackal", check out S1E6 - "Forgotten Remakes & 'Cars" Ripoffs"