The Day of the Jackal
James Bond is an evergreen. Just look how excited people are about the scant pieces of information that have been released about the next film. I know we don't yet know who will be Bond, unless there's been some major announcement since I typed this and it posted, but the Steven Knight news has me very excited even if he should be working on season two of Taboo. Nothing should take presidence over that. I've been waiting for eight years! Yes yes, Great Expectations and A Thousand Blows has numbed the pain, but it's still there. It feels like it will always be there. Anyway, Bond is the gold standard of spycraft, but with shows like Killing Eve and Slow Horses, espionage and hired killers are making a big comeback. Especially if they're slightly inept. The Jackal is not inept. But things really don't go his way. And he's so committed to his job, he holds a grudge so tightly, that, well, he'll do what he promised to do. Eventually. At any cost. Whilst also enacting sweet sweet vengeance. This is a wonderful modernization of the de Gaulle-heavy book which utilizes modern advancements in weaponry and subterfuge coupled with Eddie Redmayne's chameleonic acting abilities. I mean he's no Jodie Comer, but he'll do. And while you don't like this cool character, you root for him. You do not want him to be caught. You want him to live another day and take his cute little suitcase that transforms into a deadly weapon and just kill all the people that are causing trouble in the world. Of course, being such a renowned assassin means he has operatives obsessed with finding him. That obsessed operative is Bianca Pullman played by Lashana Lynch. The two of them are in an interesting dance. They are almost symbiotic. There lives are eerily similar. They both have partners that suspect that they have secrets and who know, deep down, that if forced to choose they will choose their work over their family. The job is everything to both of them. They have blinders on to everything else. And, like The Jackal, you don't like Bianca. The Jackal doesn't have a moral compass, but Bianca wants to believe she does. So the way that she exploits people to get what she wants is reprehensible. I know this is a bit of a conundrum. What I like about The Jackal I don't like about Bianca. But it all comes down to flair. He has flair and she's just flailing. He can pull off Edward Fox's iconic look from the 1973 adaptation and she always looks like she's lying. Which she is. Though that doesn't matter anymore now does it? Because if you've watched the show you know that she fails and dies at the hands of The Jackal. She has found him, tracked him all the way to his home, and in the end, that tiny bit of humanity is probably what did her in. No. That's being too kind to her. She just wasn't quite good enough. She didn't deserve to succeed. And the very fact that she failed is what made this series work. Her death justifies it all. I knew that he'd survive to kill another day as they are doing a second season and this isn't an anthology, but her death was a blessed surprise. It showed that she was a failure. Something the viewers believed, deep down, since the first episode. She was a wreck and belonged with Jackson Lamb. Yet the show built the two of them up to be a great showdown of colossi, so one of them couldn't have feet of clay could they? Well, they both had their weakness. At least the writers didn't hesitate to pull the trigger on the weaker one.
So I'm an AMC Insider. Why you might ask as I don't watch many shows on AMC, well, the reason I first signed up wasn't for the lovely gift card drawing, that was a recent edition, I mainly signed up because they asked questions about BBC America programing and I wanted to clearly state that BBC America should be showing actual British shows not filling their schedule with The X-Files and whatever Star Trek they feel like at the moment. Star Trek is a "little" understandable because of Patrick Stewart, but The X-Files!?! In between stating all my outrage and answering questions about my favorite Dirk Gently characters I started to get all these surveys about the upcoming show Killing Eve. The initial promos had me entirely uninterested, because they were vague and I had no idea what the show was about. After probably the tenth promo I watched I realized it was an espionage driven game of cat and mouse starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer and I decided to give it a try. Plus, Jodie Comer was really great in The White Princess so for me she was the real draw and the fact that only Oh got an Emmy nomination is shocking because I discovered in that first episode what many people came to realize as they joined the bandwagon late, Killing Eve is an exquisite dark comedy about two women on opposites sides inextricably drawn to each other where Comer is amazing in her instability. I was so desperate for more that I picked up Luke Jennings's compilation of Villanelle novellas, Codename Villanelle, to get more of a fix. But this adaptation is one of those rare occasions where it's better than the source material. Instead of a female James Bond with a hyperactive sex drive where everything is laid bare from the beginning, we're given a twisty tale that will keep you guessing until the very end and thanking whatever deity you believe in that it was renewed for a second series. 
