The Jackal (1997)

The Jackal arrives as a loose remake of a film that was itself an adaptation of a novel, and it carries the legal scars of that lineage. Frederick Forsyth and the makers of the 1973 picture objected loudly enough to force Universal into the phrase "inspired by," with sole credit going to Kenneth Ross's earlier screenplay. Michael Caton-Jones has since described the script as too long and confessed to making the film in the editing room. The results bear him out. It is a chase picture of competent gloom, the sort of thing Roger Ebert filed under the year's worst without breaking a sweat.

The casting offers a mild, unexamined inclusiveness. Sidney Poitier, in his final theatrical role, plays the deputy director with the weariness of a man who has done this before. Diane Venora's Major Koslova is a capable Russian authority figure right up until the screenplay decides she exists to be killed and to deliver a taunt about the hero's failure to protect women. That is the film's entire theory of gender. The Jackal's masquerade as a gay man, staged to reach a target's garage, produced a same-sex kiss that Bruce Willis personally fought to keep, alongside a test-screening audience that cheered when an innocent man was shot in a gay bar. GLAAD asked for a trim. The material is exploitative, never affirming.

No sermon is delivered here. The plot concerns a seventy million dollar contract killing for a mafia kingpin, and at no point does anyone pause to interrogate the economics of it. No climate anxieties. No body-positive messaging. No advocacy on behalf of the neurodivergent, though the villain is called a psychopath in the way such pictures always do. The film settles for being a straightforward thriller that wants nothing from us but our attention, and struggles to hold even that. We classify it accordingly, without pleasure and without malice, the way a coroner signs a routine form.

{"thematic_tags": ["remake"]}