There’s a strong and very reasonable case to be made against what I’m about to do. “It’s lazy and reductive to compare every British spy thriller TV series to Bond,” I hear you say. Fair enough. Not at all unreasonable. But everyone knows Bond. He is by far our most prominent and therefore shared reference point for on-screen spy thrillers, so it does actually make a lot of sense to understand and/or explain every other character in his department (and it is unquestionably his department) in reference to him. And that’s why I will now be doing exactly that.
The not-Bond in question here is Eddie Redmayne’s Jackal in new Sky drama Day of the Jackal. It follows an MI6 agent (Lashana Lynch)’s pursuit of Redmayne’s hyper-talented hitman across Europe in the wake of one of his assassinations as he prepares for his next (and, he hopes, final) job before retirement. But what kind of not-Bond is this mysterious Jackal? Is he Sporty Bond? Scary Bond? Ginger Bond? He actually kind of is Ginger Bond a little bit, yes. But more than any of these, our red-headed Jackal is Nerdy Bond. He’s James Bond for the nerds.
The casting of Redmayne alone tells you we’re probably not going to see a Craig-esque Big Buff Bond on display here. He’s a slighter, sleeker man. He’s not going to win in the power game. But if he hasn’t got massive muscles to rely on, how’s he going to best his enemies? He’s going to use something that all of us have. He’s going to use his brain.
The first episode opens with Redmayne elaborately and just-about-convincingly disguised as a German janitor who works in the building he’s trying to infiltrate. (I have a theory that the prosthetics team were asked to do 95 per cent of what they were capable of with Redmayne’s disguises, leaving just enough of the man we know is underneath peeking out for us to still recognise. I have no way of proving this.) Having kidnapped the real janitor and stolen his badge, the Jackal, not content with getting by on the ingenuity of his disguise alone, deploys a little German to the reception desk – which he appears, to my untrained monolinguistic ear at least, to speak somewhere near fluently. So he can make convincing disguises, and he can speak German. Smart fella.
Once inside the building, he keeps his head down until things kick off, at which point he expertly dispenses of anyone in his way until reaching his target, whom he shoots… in the leg? You think he’s fucked up. But, of course, he hasn’t. The leg he’s lodged his bullet in belongs to none other than the son of his real target, a prominent German politician, who must now visit his bedridden boy in hospital. Meaning the Jackal has decided where his target will be (the hospital), and when (the day after the shooting). This allows him to set up his politician-shooting shop in an apartment block across the way. What a crafty, crafty man.
That apartment block is so far across the way from the hospital that intelligence services initially believe the shot to be impossible, because it would be longer than the world record for the longest-range kill ever made. Adding to their scepticism is the footage they see of the Jackal leaving the building with a suitcase nowhere near big enough to contain the length of gun that would be needed to make such a shot, were it even possible. Except we’ve seen that this is in fact possible because, of course, the suitcase is the gun. The Jackal has broken down his murder weapon into parts that then form the handle of his handy little carry-on. Our boy is wicked smaht.
Bond does, admittedly, do some of this kind of thing. He uses special fancy weapons and he pulls off some special fancy tricks, but he does it with the help of other people, who are so smart and secret they’re not even allowed more than one letter in their name. The Jackal, meanwhile, is a one-man murder band. And ok, his gun might be made by someone else, but even that someone else is not a highly-qualified spook with the resource of an entire national intelligence agency behind them, but seemingly just kind of… some bloke? The Jackal gets serious originality points for sourcing someone like that.
The effect of this solitary approach that the Jackal takes to his handiwork is that everything he does – and gets away with – contributes significantly to our admiration for him. If and when something goes right for him, it’s not only because he’s able to pull it off in the heat of the exam hall, but because he’s done his homework and revision beforehand. It also means that you or I – with our (sorry to assume on your behalf here) not-so-Bond-like bodies, can more easily imagine and appreciate the moves the Jackal is making. Could I use some martial art and muscle I don’t have to fight off a big scary attacker? No. Could I make a sneaky little plan to maybe trip him up and then whack him in the back of the head or something? Probably still no, but maybe. And maybe’s a little closer to yes. We’re not so different, me and this Jackal.
