Big budget 'The Jackal' tosses out bare bones plot
By Laksmi Pamuntjak
JAKARTA (JP): The year was 1973, and the movie was Fred Zinnemann's The Day of The Jackal. The sight of Edward Fox, standing with his lightweight rifle, eyes ablaze with the cold detachment of the truly insane, not only spoke volumes for a decade traumatized by political assassination and mass paranoia. It also established the movie as a classic in the political thriller genre.
Now imagine Bruce Willis, three decades down the track, fiddling with an enormous, computer-controlled Gatling gun, playing "cool" as only he knows how. It's just as well that the filmmakers have gone out of their way saying that The Jackal, directed by Michael Caton-Jones (Rob Roy, Scandal), is no remake of Zinnemann's masterpiece.
Willis, whose inflationary US$70 million fee is a staggering stupefying leap from Fox's paltry $500,000, makes his Jackal merely a sleeker version of his last stint as a Man with No Name. In last year's Last Man Standing, he was also a gun-for-hire and a professional to boot.
Yes, in the freewheeling 1990s, culture vultures make sure that there's a new take on everything. Poor Zinnemann, who passed away in March this year, was reported to have been violently opposed to this project. In truth, he agonized for naught.
In The Jackal, the bones of Frederick Forsyth's celebrated story are barer than ever, the only surviving feature being the central idea about a highly-paid assassin stalking a high-profile target.
The rest is pure 1990s formula, although the pace is curiously sedate for a beat-the-clock thriller. Like Mission Impossible before it, it has cerebral pretensions but comes off wearing all its surprises in plain sight. Seek and you shall not find even a splinter of wit or imagination in this movie.
On the one hand, this kind of shallowness and lethargy reflects the ideological void created by the demise of the Cold War (witness the movie's impassioned opening montage of communism's dying moments).
On the other hand, it is a typical Hollywood exercise in stupefaction. At the end of the day, after all the crafty bravura of yet another natural born killer, the whole experience is totally meaningless.
Just take a look at the radically shifting premise. Whereas The Day of the Jackal tells the story of a group of French military extremists trying to overthrow de Gaulle's government for granting independence to Algeria, The Jackal zeros in on a Russian mobster's vendetta against the Feds for accidentally killing his brother.
After all, this is The Jackal of the 1990s: the difference between "mission" or "personal retribution" has no purchase on his conscience than does the fact that he's being grossly overpaid.
Sure, the Russkies are back, and the fate of America, as usual, hangs by its habitual thread. Yet there's no more mission, screams the movie, there's only money. And so it takes the fight out of anyone trying to look for "issues".
The problem is that this indifference translates itself all too starkly on screen such that broadcasting Bruce Willis as "ice" and Richard Gere as "fire" couldn't be further away from the truth.
Granted, Val Kilmer's giddy self-obsession in The Saint is no competition to Willis' special brand of cool: he's cool because he doesn't try to be cool.
But despite his galaxy of identities, there are no little curls of suspense which come from waiting for fresh tricks and disguises, or from generally watching a devil incarnate at play.
Like its predecessor, the movie aims to create tension through a double-chase, with the authorities trying to take the Jackal out before he gets to his mysterious quarry. This is where Richard Gere, as convicted IRA terrorist Declan Mulqueen, steps into the picture.
In a way it is a blessing that the monumentally wooden Gere doesn't try to clamor for attention (prime examples of typical Richard Gere overkill can be found in Mr. Jones and First Knight).
But underplaying a role described as "fire" proves to be even more unsettling, as Gere reluctantly sheds his oiled, wise-guy swagger in favor of an emotionless stab at low-key intelligence. His only salvation lies in his moment of truth during the final scene in the New York subway. Not since Mission Impossible's Tom Cruise was perched atop a TGV running at full speed have we seen a grimace so convincing.
Furthermore, while Gere's Irish accent meanders from one side of Ireland to this side of ridiculous, the movie's drab and lifeless proceedings do not lend any credence to his almost psychic leaps of intuition, nor his new-found action persona.
In fact, the Willis-Gere blood feud is pure souffle compared to the memorable private wars between Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich (In the Line of Fire), Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken (Nick of Time) and, of course, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta (Face/Off).
On closer scrutiny, even the Jackal's IQ is highly suspect: impressive minimalism aside, he has too many branches in his inefficient head. This explains why the movie never lets him dwell on his method, preferring instead to give him sporadic moments of fawning lechery. Linger a tad longer, and it's easy to see the schmalzy cracks in logic.
Caton-Jones further dumps his actors in a sea of boringly straightforward dialog that does nothing to Forsyth's legacy (no wonder Chuck Pfarrer's screenplay is credited instead to Kenneth Ross' screenplay of the 1973 classic).
His attempt to dignify the cast is, at best, hit-or-miss. He misfires with Sidney Poitier, whose performance as FBI Deputy Director Carter Preston is weightless and outdated, but scores with Diane Venora. The latter not only cloaks her portrayal of steely CIA operative Major Koslova in a sense of mounting urgency, but also a Garboesque mix of elegance and aloofness.
What's likely to stay with us after The Jackal has ended is those teasingly fitful forays into hipsterdom; like The Saint before it, the soundtrack is flooded with the likes of Primal Scream, Massive Attack and Bush. Indeed, "freshening" the movie's demographics seems to be foremost in the espionage genre's post- Cold War priorities.