‘You must understand that this is a once-in-a-lifetime job, whoever does it can never work again…’
‘Political thriller’. Hmmm. Feels like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Can anything ‘political’ also be ‘thrilling’? Fred Zinnemann’s beloved 1973 adaptation of William Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal starts off great, and it does have some thrilling moments, but this film does not need to be 143 minutes long, and I must admit that there were stretches where I was confused, bored or both…
I can confidently deliver the elevator pitch for this movie. A militant underground organisation, disgusted by the French government granting independence to Algeria, hire a British assassin (the eponymous ‘Jackal’ (Edward Fox)), to take down French president Charles de Gaulle. Anything aside from this basic plot outline is murky to me. There were times during this film when I felt as if I had drunk three pints of premium lager, and everything had become slightly bewildering.
The first hour of The Day of the Jackal is great. Intrigue. Scheming. Best laid plans. It’s exciting, compelling stuff. After the excellent first act, however, it all starts to go a bit Bond. I often find that the best part of any heist movie is the getting-the-band-back-together phase, and so it is here. The planning of the assassination is more fun than the actual act itself.
While I thoroughly enjoyed Edward Fox parading around with his top off and just generally being cool as fuck, that’s not enough to shake the fact that anything that can be described as ‘political’ will generally be tedious. Knock half an hour off, add more Terminators and come back to me.
