The Day of the Jackal (1973)
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
An international assassin known as ‘The Jackal’ is employed by disgruntled French generals to kill President Charles de Gaulle, with a dedicated gendarme on the assassin’s trail.
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What critics compared The Day of the Jackal to
The Jackal is a trashy, frenetic remake of Fred Zinnemann's 1973 The Day of the Jackal, a fascinatingly deadpan Continental manhunt thriller that served up its trickery and disguises with a fair degree of sophistication and wit.
Inspired by the rough outline of the 1973 film "The Day of the Jackal," which focused on a plot to do away with French leader Charles de Gaulle, "The Jackal" probably sounded good enough to fill out the dance card of stars like Bruce Willis and Richard Gere and director Michael Caton-Jones.
You pretend you're making a remake of "The Day of the Jackal," Fred Zinnemann's 1973 thriller based on the Frederick Forsyth novel about the assassination plot against Charles De Gaulle.
In director Michael Caton-Jones's loosely based remake of Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973), the classic theme of using a criminal to catch a criminal is employed.
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones; written by Chuck Pfarrer, based on the motion picture screenplay "The Day of the Jackal" by Kenneth Ross; director of photography, Karl Walter Lindenlaub; edited by Jim Clark; music by Carter Burwell; production designer, Michael White; produced by James Jacks, Sean Daniels, Caton-Jones and Kevin Jarre; released by Universal Pictures.
Fred Zinneman's masterful 1973 adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's bestselling novel "The Day of the Jackal" is unforgivably mutilated in "The Jackal," an alleged "remake" that resembles neither Forsyth's novel nor Zinneman's film sufficiently to claim any relation to either.
Then again, Caton-Jones took an unfair critical drubbing for his highly entertaining reworking of The Day of the Jackal.
The Bourne Identity recalls the chill, low-key efficiency of The Day of the Jackal (1973) and Three Days of the Condor (1975); it could have been called Four Days of the Cipher.
With its focus on the fascinating minutiae of carrying out an assassination, The American partly resembles the fine 1973 thriller The Day Of The Jackal, about an attempt on Charles de Gaulle’s life, though it’s much sparer, and completely apolitical.
His contact sends him a mysterious client (Thekla Reuten), who asks him to manufacture a lightweight weapon not unlike the one in Frederick Forsyth's "The Day of the Jackal."
But we don't see it here, for Corbijn, unfortunately, has absolutely no idea how to build suspense, sustain a story or tighten the tension around the filmgoer's throat the way Fred Zinneman did so superbly in The Day of the Jackal (1973), the style and feel of which this picture so desperately wants to emulate.
That's a promising moment ? it suggests that Clooney is playing the sort of sociopathic hitman one remembers from films like The Day of the Jackal (1973).
With its European tone and methodical assassinations, it reminds me of 1973's The Day of the Jackal.
The first comes from Michael Lonsdale–probably best known to American viewers from his key role in “The Day of the Jackal” (an obvious template for “Munich”) and as the bad guy in “Moonraker”–as a silky-smooth peddler of information who is all the more terrifying because he has no ideological concerns or boundaries; he will deal with anyone as long as the price is right and is cheerfully willing to sell the whereabouts of his customers to those they are hunting without hesitation.
With expensive assistance from an enigmatic French contact (Mathieu Amalric) and his avuncular father (crafty scene-stealer Michael Lonsdale, who trailed another terrorist on-screen 32 years ago in "The Day of the Jackal"), the squad tracks down its targets and hits them, literally, where they live: a literary scholar in Rome, a professor in Paris ...
Some scenes are heisted by Craig, Hinds, Geoffrey Rush as the main Mossad string-puller, Matt Kassovitz as the bomb nerd, Mathieu Amalric as the French fox, Ayelet Zurer as Kauffman's wife, Michael Lonsdale as the Frenchie's life-savoring but cynical father, a role to place next to his splendid, worldly inspector in "The Day of the Jackal."
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In fact, “The Double,” in which the unlikely pair star, is a sleek, taut spy-thriller with echoes of “The Day of the Jackal.”
The race to nail the assassin could have been lifted from The Day of the Jackal.
Thus "In the Line of Fire" joins a great tradition of cat-mouse assassination thrillers, such as "Rogue Male," "The Day of the Jackal," "The Eye of the Needle" and one or two others I could name.
The benchmark for assassination movies is "The Day of the Jackal," Fred Zinnemann's crisp, finely tuned 1973 adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth best seller about a plot to kill Charles de Gaulle.
Think of "The Parallax View," "Three Days of the Condor," "JFK," "The Day of the Jackal," "North By Northwest," and "The Fugitive"; this film shamelessly borrows from the best, and while it isn't as good as any of these I mentioned, it does move along at a commendable pace and with at least a modicum of excitement, thanks to its director, Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day," "Tears of the Sun"), and its star.
Adapting Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter’s novel “Point of Impact,” the first entry in a trilogy featuring military sniper Bob Lee Swagger, scenarist Jonathan Lemkin stirs in recognizable ingredients from “The Parallax View,” “The Day of the Jackal,” “Seven Days in May” and “Three Days of the Condor,” feeding on and encouraging suspicion of nefarious deeds and dastardly motives among men in high places.
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Seeing Edward Fox (“The Day of the Jackal”), Michael Gambon (Dumbledore, kids) and the vulpine Charles Dance (“Labyrinth,” “Game of Thrones”) as debonair old men no longer “Licensed to Kill” is a single-scene delight.
Johnny joins other “older” agents played by such venerable British actors as Charles Dance (“Game of Thrones”), Michael Gambon, the second Albus Dumbledore of the “Harry Potter” films, and Edward Fox (“The Day of the Jackal”) for a meeting and accidentally (?) sidelines them all with a stun grenade hidden in a fountain pen.
In mood and style, Ronin is more like 1973's The Day of the Jackal than 1997's The Jackal.