8.5 / 10
My Favorite Jackal
The Jackal is my favorite telling of this story. I first saw it in a theater years ago, it took me completely by surprise, and I’ve watched it four or five times since. It still works.
It’s a loose remake of Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 The Day of the Jackal, itself based on Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel. In the book and the first film, a French extremist group hires a nameless English assassin in 1963 to kill President Charles de Gaulle, and a dogged French detective races to find him. Edward Fox played the killer.
The 1997 version was shot under the original title, until Forsyth, Zinnemann and the 1973 film’s producer went to court to stop it, so it came out in November 1997 as The Jackal, marketed as “inspired by” the earlier film. I haven’t seen the 1973 version. I have seen the 2024 series, and my review of it explains why this one beats it.
Michael Caton-Jones directed. Chuck Pfarrer wrote the first script, and Kevin Jarre did an uncredited rewrite that added the character who makes the film work: Declan Mulqueen, the man with a personal reason to want the Jackal dead.
The Setup
The story starts in Moscow. Russian police and the FBI raid a nightclub owned by an Azerbaijani gangster named Terek Murad, and his younger brother dies in the fight. Murad wants revenge on the Americans, so he hires the most expensive killer he can find, a former KGB man known only as the Jackal, for seventy million dollars.
When the FBI learns about the contract, it guesses wrong about the target. Deputy Director Carter Preston, played by Sidney Poitier, and Major Valentina Koslova of the Russian MVD, played by Diane Venora, assume the FBI Director is the mark. Their problem is that nobody knows what the Jackal looks like.
One person does. Isabella Zancona once saw his face. She’s a former Basque separatist who now lives under the radar in Virginia. She won’t talk to the government, but she’ll talk to Mulqueen, the IRA sniper she once loved. So Preston gets Mulqueen out of prison on a promise, and the hunt is on.
Bruce Willis, the Chameleon
Bruce Willis plays the Jackal perfectly. He comes across as cold but charming, a chameleon who changes his hair, his accent, his clothes and his whole manner from one city to the next. Each disguise is a different man, and every one of them is believable.
I totally believed him. In an assassin story, that’s the job, and Willis does it without ever winking at the camera. He’s polite, patient and completely without conscience, and the charm makes the coldness worse.
Watch how he moves through the world. He crosses from Canada into the United States by boat over the Great Lakes and sails into a Chesapeake marina as a friendly stranger. In Washington he finds a stranger’s apartment to hide in, and he slips in and out of identities with forged papers and new faces. Every move is planned, and when something goes wrong, he improvises without breaking a sweat.
The same year, Willis also starred in The Fifth Element, a completely different kind of movie. Put the two side by side and you see how much range he had when a role gave him room.
For Writers
The Jackal is frightening because he’s pleasant. He’s courteous to everyone he meets, right up until it stops being useful.
A villain who’s charming outside and cold underneath gives readers two feelings in every scene: they enjoy his company and dread what comes next. Let the charm do real work. If the people around him like him, the reader will understand how he gets close enough to do damage.
Gere and Poitier
Richard Gere’s Mulqueen is the right counterweight: a killer with a code, out of prison on a promise, who knows how the Jackal thinks because he’s seen it up close. Gere plays him with a soft Irish accent and a long fuse, and his grudge is personal. Years earlier, in Libya, the Jackal shot Isabella, and she lost the baby she was carrying. Mulqueen’s child.
That history gives the hunt a heart. Preston wants to stop an assassination, and Mulqueen wants to settle a debt.
Sidney Poitier plays Preston with his usual quiet authority, in what turned out to be his last film role for theaters. Diane Venora is strong as Koslova, the tough Russian major who started the hunt. Mathilda May plays Isabella with real warmth, so you understand why Mulqueen still cares.
It’s a great setup. There’s a great villain, a great protagonist and a great target, and the story gives each of them a real arc.
For Writers
The rewrite that added Mulqueen turned a procedural into a grudge match.
A hunter chasing a stranger is a job. A hunter chasing the man who took something from him is a story. If your investigator feels flat, look for a way to tie them to the villain before page one, then let the reader learn it at the moment it hurts most.
Jack Black Gets What’s Coming
I’ve never liked Jack Black. He only ever plays Jack Black, a smart-aleck idiot, and I don’t like that character. Here he plays Ian Lamont, a Montreal machinist the Jackal hires to build a remote-controlled mount for a huge anti-aircraft gun, and Lamont is exactly that character: a mouthy amateur who decides to squeeze the Jackal for more money.
That’s a mistake. The Jackal tests the finished weapon on him, and to tell you the truth, watching Bruce Willis blow Jack Black apart was satisfying. It’s also the scene where the film shows you exactly what the Jackal is, so when he turns up charming in the next city, you can’t forget it.
The gun itself is a big change from the novel. Forsyth’s Jackal carried a slim custom rifle hidden in a crutch. Willis’s Jackal brings a weapon the size of a small car and fires it from a van with a laptop. It’s a 1990s idea of high-tech murder, and it gives the finale its scale.
The Target
I won’t name the target. The first time I watched The Jackal, I didn’t see it coming. That reveal is one of the reasons I keep coming back. The film keeps you guessing about who’s in the crosshairs until late, and when it tells you, the stakes jump.
The misdirection is part of the design. The FBI spends much of the film protecting the wrong person, and you believe them because they believe it. The Jackal is always one step ahead, and the hunt costs the good guys people they can’t afford to lose.
For Writers
The audience knows a hit is coming for most of the film and doesn’t know who it’s for.
A withheld target lets every scene carry two questions at once: will he succeed, and who is he after? When you hold back a key fact in a thriller, make sure the reveal raises the stakes. A surprise that only satisfies curiosity is a trick. One that makes the reader more afraid is a turn in the story.
Behind the Scenes
The production moved fast. The shoot ran from August to the end of November 1996 in Chicago, Washington, Richmond, South Carolina, Wilmington, Montreal, London, Moscow and Finland, with Helsinki and nearby Porvoo standing in for parts of Russia. The finale’s Washington subway scenes were filmed in the Montreal Metro.
Caton-Jones later admitted he never really liked the script, and said he made the film in the editing room. Edward Fox, the original Jackal, was offered a cameo and turned it down. Larry King turns up as himself, a young J.K. Simmons plays an FBI agent, and Carter Burwell wrote the score.
How Does The Jackal (1997) Compare to the 2024 Series?
The two versions share a title character and very little else. The 1997 film runs about two hours and never stops moving. The 2024 series runs ten episodes of close to an hour each, and a big part of the middle goes to the Jackal’s marriage and home life.
Where the gap shows most is in the hunters. Mulqueen and Preston are men you want to win: one has a code, the other has decency, and both are smart. The MI6 officer in the 2024 version bullies and lies her way through the case, and by the middle I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to root for. In 1997 there was never any question.
The 2024 series has better photography, shot entirely on location, and a stronger first hour. The 1997 film has the better story, the better villain and the better surprise. I’ll take the story.
For Writers
Two hours forced the 1997 film to keep only the scenes that move the hunt forward.
More room isn’t always an advantage. A tight frame makes you choose, and the choosing is where the story gets its pace. When you have space to spare, cut as if you didn’t, and keep only the subplots that raise the stakes of the main line.
Why the Critics Got It Wrong
Critics hated The Jackal. It sits at 24 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 36 on Metacritic. Roger Ebert called it “glum” and “curiously flat,” and put it on his worst-of-1997 list. The Austin Chronicle called it the year’s most tedious movie. Even the opening-night crowd only gave it a B-minus CinemaScore.
Ticket buyers kept showing up anyway. It opened at number one with $15.2 million, and on a $60 million budget it took in about $159 million worldwide.
I’m with the audiences. Any critic who calls it flat wasn’t watching Willis. This is a big, confident, well-paced thriller with a villain you believe and a hunt that keeps moving, and four or five viewings haven’t worn it out for me.
Is The Jackal (1997) worth watching?
Yes. It’s a great movie, with a great character arc, a great villain and a target that took me completely by surprise. Bruce Willis gives one of his best performances as a cold, charming chameleon, and Richard Gere and Sidney Poitier give the hunt real weight.
It’s an 8.5, and it’s my favorite version of the Jackal. If you like it, try Leon: The Professional next. If you’ve only seen the 2024 series, start here.
