7 / 10
A Remake of a Remake
The Day of the Jackal has been made before, more than once. Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel was about a professional assassin hired by French extremists to kill President Charles de Gaulle, and it became Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 film with Edward Fox as the killer. In 1997 the film was loosely remade as The Jackal, with Bruce Willis. That one is still my favorite.
Now it’s back a third time, as a ten-episode television series. Ronan Bennett created it and ran the writers’ room, and Forsyth himself signed on as a consulting producer. It premiered on Sky Atlantic in Britain on November 7, 2024, and on Peacock in the United States a week later, one episode a week through mid-December.
I bought it on DVD and watched the whole season, then went back and watched the first couple of episodes again.
Bennett kept the bones of Forsyth’s story, the nameless professional and the investigator who won’t let go. He threw out the politics of 1963. The target this time is Ulle Dag Charles, a tech billionaire about to launch a technology called River that would upend the people who hold the money. Somebody very rich wants him dead before it ships, and they’re willing to pay the Jackal one hundred million dollars to see to it.
The Setup
Eddie Redmayne plays the Jackal, a British assassin for hire with a cast of his own face in a vault and a second life in Spain. At home he’s Charles Calthrop, a businessman who travels a lot, with a wife, Nuria, played by Úrsula Corberó, and a young son. Nuria has no idea what he does for a living.
Lashana Lynch plays Bianca Pullman, a former police officer and firearms expert who now works in a small section of MI6. She notices that the rifle used in a record-distance shot in the first episode was custom-built. That one detail puts her on the Jackal’s trail. Her bosses, Osita Halcrow and Isabel Kirby, played by Chukwudi Iwuji and Lia Williams, let her keep digging while they work their own angles.
Charles Dance turns up as Timothy Winthrop, a financier with very deep pockets and very bad intentions. The hunt runs across Germany, Belarus, Hungary, Estonia, Croatia and Spain, with Bianca a step behind and the Jackal improvising when his plans go wrong.
The First Episode
The first episode is really good. It opens with some exciting shots of the Jackal setting up a staged attack in Germany and then taking a long-range kill that no ordinary sniper could make. It moves with the patience and precision of the man himself, and it makes you understand his craft before it shows you anything about his heart. I liked it enough to watch it twice.
Across the season, the action scenes hold up. When the show is about the hunt, the planning and the shooting, it works.
For Writers
The first episode shows the Jackal at work before it shows him at home, so the audience knows exactly what he is before they meet the family who doesn’t.
A thriller that leads with competence is using one of the oldest tricks in the genre, and it still works. Once a reader has watched your protagonist do the dangerous thing well, every quiet domestic scene afterward carries a charge, because the reader knows what the people around him don’t.
Shot on Location
The cinematography is gorgeous, and it deserved every award it was up for. Everything is shot on location. That’s one of the things that makes the show so good: it has the same lived-in look I love in The Expanse, and the look makes it feel real.
Sky reportedly spent around one hundred million pounds, and you can see where it went. Production began in Budapest in June 2023 and ran for about seven months across four countries, moving through Vienna and then along the Croatian coast, at Rijeka, Opatija, the island of Pag and central Istria. Even the Jackal’s Spanish hideaway is a real house on a real hillside; its exteriors were filmed in Rabac, in Croatia.
Christopher Ross shot the first episode, and his work there earned an Emmy nomination for cinematography. The streets look like streets, the farmhouses look like someone farms there, and the hotel corridors look like places people pass through. Nothing feels built for the camera. The danger feels close because the places feel real.
For Writers
Real places come with real mess: weather, clutter, wear, strangers in the background.
Settings in fiction go sterile when the writer describes only what the plot needs. Give each place a detail or two that serves nobody, a stain on a counter, a radio left on in another room, and the reader starts to believe the world goes on outside the scene. That belief makes the danger in the scene feel real.
Redmayne’s Jackal
The Jackal is the antihero, and Redmayne plays him charming and pleasant, a killer you can’t help liking in his scenes. He’s soft-spoken, polite and a little awkward, and he’s very good at becoming someone else. Over the season he passes as a dead man’s chauffeur, an architectural engineer with a clipboard and, with Nuria’s help, an elderly man in a wheelchair rolling through airport customs.
That charm sits on top of a man who kills whoever gets in the way: a motorist and a police officer after a fender-bender in France, the farmer who catches him in a barn, a young man who trusted him. The show never pretends otherwise, and Redmayne never asks you to forgive him. He just makes you like him anyway.
Redmayne also served as an executive producer, and he talked about wanting time to explore the Jackal as a person. The performance earned him Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice and Screen Actors Guild nominations.
The Saggy Middle
The middle of the season is where my thumb found the fast forward button. A large part of it is about the Jackal trying to juggle his wife and his business, and it didn’t work for me.
When I reached the end, I understood why they built it that way and why the story turned out the way it did. The home life sets up the finale. That knowledge didn’t make those episodes any more interesting while I was watching them. It’s a classic saggy middle: the beginning is strong, the ending pays off, and the stretch between them sags.
I’m not alone on this one. The ten episodes run between 46 and 61 minutes each, and Rolling Stone’s David Fear praised Redmayne and Lynch while calling the season bloated, “an epic amount of gorgeous, globetrotting Mid TV.” Most of the show’s problems come down to that runtime. A tighter season would have kept the hunt in front and the marriage in the background, where it does its best work.
For Writers
Ten episodes give the story room it didn’t need, and the domestic thread fills that room instead of earning it.
A subplot that only pays off at the end still has to be interesting on the way there. If readers have to take it on faith that a thread matters, many of them will skim it. Give the setup its own tension in every scene, or cut it down to the beats the ending needs.
Who Is the Villain Here?
The problem is the woman hunting him. I never believed Bianca Pullman. She’s a horrible person, unethical as hell, and I wouldn’t want her in the same city as me, much less the same room. Anyone who behaved the way she does would be fired immediately from any real organization, never mind an intelligence service.
Her own conduct gives you plenty to go on. In the first episode she has a source’s activist daughter arrested to squeeze information out of the mother. The girl dies in custody, and Bianca hides the death so she can keep the pressure on. Later she and her partner torture a prisoner for a location. Her marriage is falling apart, and her own family pays for her obsession.
By the middle of the season, I wasn’t sure who the protagonist was and who the antagonist was supposed to be. Perhaps the show wants the hunter and the hunted to blur together. It didn’t land that way for me. A cat-and-mouse story needs a cat you believe in, and I didn’t believe in this one.
For Writers
The show makes its killer pleasant and its investigator cruel, and it leaves the audience without anyone to stand behind.
Moral gray works when the reader still has a reason to want one side to win. If both leads are monsters, give one of them a line they won’t cross, a person they protect, or a cost they visibly feel. Without it, readers stop caring who wins and start watching the clock.
The Safe
The other moment I didn’t buy is when Nuria breaks into her husband’s safe and finds his stash of money and the tools of his other life. It exposes everything, and it sets up a whole new set of plot lines.
That discovery is a turning point, and it needed to feel inevitable. It felt convenient. A man as careful as the Jackal, who plans a shot down to the wind, keeps his secrets somewhere his wife can open? It could have been handled better.
What the Critics Said
Critics liked the show more than I did. It holds an 85 percent approval score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 72 on Metacritic. The Guardian’s Rebecca Nicholson gave it four stars and called it “a taut, lean drama that makes the most out of its acting talent,” and Richard Roeper gave it three and a half out of four, praising the locations and the action.
Awards voters were kind too. Besides the Golden Globe nomination for best drama series and the Emmy nomination for the first episode’s cinematography, the cast picked up a Screen Actors Guild ensemble nomination. I’d agree with every word of praise for the locations, the photography and Redmayne. The rest is where my 7 comes from.
Is The Day of the Jackal (2024) worth watching?
Yes. It’s entertaining, the first episode is excellent, the photography is gorgeous and the action is good. The middle sags, the MI6 officer is hard to stomach and the safe scene stretches belief, so I kept my finger on the fast forward button through a good part of it.
That adds up to a 7, and I think that’s the right number. Peacock and Sky renewed it for a second season, due in 2027. Production started in February 2026, with Pablo Schreiber, Weruche Opia and Matt Bomer joining the cast.
If you like slow-burn assassin stories, this sits comfortably next to Leon: The Professional and The Bourne Identity, a step below both. And if you haven’t seen The Jackal (1997), start there.
