The Day of the Jackal Gets Off to a Killer Start — Grade the Premiere!
Peacock has its sights set on thrills with the new assassin drama The Day of the Jackal, and it doesn’t waste any time getting to the good stuff.
As Thursday’s premiere opens, we watch what appears to be an old man practicing a foreign language in the mirror — but when the real old man turns up dead, we realize this is just a disguise. The man in disguise enters a Munich office building posing as a janitor, slipping upstairs and pulling out a gun as he nears his target. He’s discovered, though, and has to shoot several people dead before zeroing in on his target, a young German man. The man runs for his life down a staircase, and the killer shoots him in the leg before taking aim at his head… but the bullet whizzes past his temple. The killer makes a daring escape, hurling smoke bombs and gliding down the side of the building on a wire before disappearing. Later, we see his true face: He’s the Jackal, a top-notch assassin played by Eddie Redmayne.
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His target was Elias, the son of Manfred Fest, the top candidate running for German chancellor. As Manfred rushes to the hospital to visit his son, the Jackal sets up shop at a nearby building, assembling a sniper rifle from an ordinary-looking suitcase and putting a red pinwheel outside his room’s balcony. (Ah, so he only wounded Elias to draw Manfred out into the open.) When Manfred exits his car at the hospital, the Jackal lines up his shot and fires, with a bullet ripping through Manfred’s skull. Then the Jackal calmly disassembles his rifle and leaves a timed device under his bed before zipping off in a Mercedes. As the authorities arrive at the room where he took the shot, the timed device explodes, and the Jackal switches cars in a parking garage, setting the first car to blow up, too. He’s good at this!
In London, we meet MI6 agent Bianca (played by Lashana Lynch), who’s just learning about what happened in Germany. When she hears the bullet came from more than 2 miles away, she says that’s not possible, and she should know: “Snipers are my perch.” She tells her superiors a shot from that distance would top the world record for a confirmed kill, and she insists the gun must be custom-made by Norman Stoke, a fugitive gunmaker in Northern Ireland. She volunteers to find him… even though her fellow agents label her “a pain in the arse.” Meanwhile, the Jackal covers his tracks by buying an expensive collectible chess set in Nuremberg, showing it off to the border guards who eventually wave him through.
Bianca flies to Belfast to meet Alison, an asset who can connect her with Norman Stoke — missing out on her daughter’s parent-teacher night in the process — and there’s tension between them right away, with Bianca threatening to throw Alison in prison if she doesn’t comply. The Jackal is hiding out in Paris, using a secure messaging network to invoice for his hit on Manfred Fest, when he gets a message from a mystery client offering him a new job. He refuses to meet in person, but when they offer a $10 million fee, he relents… but he demands $1 million just to meet. He heads to Sweden, sneaking up behind the client in a bird-watching hutch and not letting her see his face. The target is tech billionaire Ulle Dag Charles (The Crown’s Khalid Abdalla), who is readying a new application to make the world’s finances completely transparent. (Rich people hate that.) The Jackal tells her it’ll cost them $100 million (!), though, and when she says she’ll have to consult with her colleagues, he vanishes without a word.
Bianca isn’t hearing back from Alison, so she decides to approach from another angle: Alison’s daughter Emily, a London college student who’s cozy with radical campus lefties. Bianca and the cops find Emily at a protest and haul her in, intending to hold her as blackmail to get Alison to give up Norman Stoke’s location. But when they lock Emily in a holding cell, she goes into cardiac arrest, and Bianca rides in the ambulance with her as the poor girl convulses — and eventually flatlines. The Jackal jets off to Spain, where he reunites with his wife (!) Nuria, played by Money Heist’s úrsula Corberó, who seems blissfully unaware of his line of work. At home, he gets back on the secure messaging app to ask again for payment for the Manfred Fest hit, which he still has not received. The response he gets back? “F–K. YOU.” Uh-oh… you may not want to make this guy angry.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Give the Day of the Jackal premiere a grade in our poll, and then hit the comments and tell us if you’ll keep watching.
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