Right from the start, is double crossing us. As soon as we see Eddie Redmayne’s titular assassin reconstruct a sniper rifle from a suitcase handle in his nondescript European hotel room and neatly haemorrhage the medulla oblongata of a German alt-right politician from precisely 3,815 metres away, we think: so far, so spy thriller. Indeed, we may worry that Sky’s 10 episode adaptation of ’s 1971 classic novel (which sees former play Redmayne’s cat-and-mouse counterpart) is an identikit of the 1973 silver screen iteration – Edward Fox’s Jackal tried to take out Charles De Gaulle, now Eddie Redmayne has his crosshairs on German nationalism.
Not so. The best spy thrillers have always been metrics of social power, gadgets for identifying the real political puppet masters. In 2024, the Jackal’s prey is not the incendiary populist leader – a little 2016, don’t you think? – but the tech bro billionaire whose main motivation is to ‘plunge the world into unimaginable chaos’ with his nifty new app.
This, seems to suggest, is the kind of man we, and The Powers That Be, should be scared of. And for modern day villains, we need modern day heroes. If only we had any.
Lashana Lynch’s Bianca, a secret service ballistics expert balancing office with international espionage plots, might initially seem as if she’s the archetypal tough-as-nails cop-with-a-heart to Redmayne’s amoral assassin. Bianca ‘knows guns,’ says one chief after reluctantly allowing her a (li.