When I was a late teenager I went to my mate’s house to pick him up, which you just don’t do as an adult, do you? I feel like for a 24-month period in my teens, all I did was go to mates’ houses to pick them up: hands in my hoodie pockets and kicking my feet on the carpet, making an agonising attempt at polite conversation with a series of uninterested parents while a friend of mine, upstairs, frantically turned his bedroom over to find a sort-of-clean pair of jeans.
One of these times, I was isolated with a friend’s dad who, on the best day of his life, probably said 10 full words out loud. The Bourne Identity boomed out of the TV and we both stared at it, me standing, him sitting, complete silence. Matt Damon shot a man in the head, then another man, then drove a car over a bridge, then shot another man. The camera moved around frenetically; the room flickered with light. And my friend’s dad, for the first time in his life, said a sentence to me unprompted. And it was: “Wouldn’t it be ace to just wake up and be that good?”
I was reminded of that this week when watching the Eddie Redmayne-led remake of The Day of the Jackal (7 November, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), where Redmayne is the Jackal, and he has woken up that good. He is a master of disguise and an even greater master of a sniper rifle. He is careful and considered and doesn’t make mistakes. He folds his gun away and leaves a bomb under the bed for any riot police who can figure out where the shot came from. He switches cars between Munich and Paris and disappears like a wisp of smoke. He can speak in any language and any accent and, for some reason, collects old chess pieces. He wears a suede jacket in episode two that is so beautiful it made me want to bite my own hands off. He stands in an internet cafe with a hand on his hip and drinks a swampy vending machine espresso and even makes that look cool. I can’t get over it.
We all agree, obviously, that assassins are cool, and TV and film sequences where someone plans a high-stakes, impossible-angled shot (then actually pulls it off!) are really cool, too. The problem with assassin stories is, necessarily, they kind of have to be about the downfall of the assassin. They are plunged into a mess, or a disaster, or a pulse point of family is pressed upon, and they have to think on their feet for as long as we can hold our breath until, ultimately, they are caught. And as soon as that starts happening, they are immediately less cool. Watching a guy make a shot from a mile away is amazing; watching him run into an obvious trap because they used a voice recording of his wife is lame. Many assassin stories speed through the good bit (cool kills!) to race to the more boring and rubbish bit (badly written scenes where a small child says: “Daddy, are you going away?”).
Thankfully, The Day of the Jackal has avoided all that, and it is amazing for it. I, like you, wondered whether Eddie Redmayne – an astonishing actor who nevertheless feels as if he still wears a prefect badge – had it in him to play a calculated, controlled, elegant weapon of astounding horror, but he really, really does. His Jackal is chameleonic and ice-cold, a different man from scene to scene, never really knowing who he is and how he ended up here but seeing that he is doing a thousand calculations at once while he’s doing it. Redmayne doesn’t actually have much dialogue, and he doesn’t move his face much either, but somehow he conveys all this by stalking around the screen in a turtleneck: it’s as if he’s secretly uncovered a new way of acting.
A cat-and-mouse chase wouldn’t work, though, if the cat weren’t as compelling as the mouse, and Lashana Lynch’s Bianca is a wonderful foil. A slightly annoying co-worker at MI6, a stretched-too-thin mum at home, a double agent when the need arises, she’s grabbed on to a few grainy CCTV screenshots of Eddie Redmayne running away from Germany with both hands and all her teeth. The pair haven’t even met in the episodes I’ve seen – I’m sure their “Heat diner scene” is in the post, and I personally can’t wait – but they somehow manage to play off each other anyway. Hey: wouldn’t it be ace to wake up and make a TV show that good?
