The Jackal (1997) review – The guilty pleasure defence

🎬 Introduction

🕵️ This review is part of the Frederick Forsyth hub — the novels, the adaptations, and which of them are actually adaptations.

Let us deal with the reception first, because it is unavoidable.

The Jackal scored 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert put it on his worst films of 1997 and called it dumbed down. And Frederick Forsyth, together with Fred Zinnemann — who directed the excellent 1973 version — went to the trouble of filing an injunction to stop Universal releasing it under the original title.

They had a point. This film has almost nothing to do with the novel. It is also, watched on a Friday night with no expectations, one of the most purely entertaining thrillers of the decade.

🎯 What it actually is

An Azerbaijani criminal called Terek Murad loses his brother to a joint FBI and Russian operation in Moscow. His response is to hire an assassin nobody can identify, for seventy million dollars, to kill a prominent American — and the point of the fee is that the killing must be public enough to be a message.

The FBI, led by Sidney Poitier’s Deputy Director Carter Preston, has no photograph, no name and no method. What it has is Declan Mulqueen, a former IRA sniper serving a long sentence, who is one of the very few people alive to have seen the Jackal’s face.

So the film is a hunt with a compromised asset in the middle of it, which is a solid spine, and it runs on the same fuel Forsyth’s book did: a professional assembling an attempt piece by piece while a team of people who cannot afford to be wrong tries to work out what he is building.

Willis is the reason it works. He plays the Jackal as nothing at all — no charm, no philosophy, no relish. He moves through a series of disguises and passports with the manner of a man doing paperwork, and the film’s coldest sequence, in which he tests his weapon on a live human being purely to confirm the mount holds, is played with total indifference. It is genuinely unsettling, and it is not a performance Willis got much credit for.

🎬 The craft

Michael Caton-Jones shoots this like the expensive studio thriller it is: Moscow, Montreal, Chicago, Washington, a lot of grey, a lot of night, and a plot that never stops moving for two hours.

The set pieces are strong. The gun itself is the film’s best invention — a remotely operated, vehicle-mounted cannon assembled from crated parts, and the scene where its assistant gunsmith tries to extort more money and finds out what kind of client he has taken on is the most memorable thing in it. Jack Black, four years before anybody knew who he was, does more with that role than the script gave him.

Where the critics were right: the last twenty minutes are conventional. The disguises get sillier as the film goes on, the Metro finale is standard-issue, and the reveal of the real target is a swap that adds nothing except the ability to keep the audience guessing for an extra half hour.

Where they were unfair: they were reviewing a comparison, not a film. Almost every contemporary notice spends its first paragraph on Zinnemann and Edward Fox. Anybody watching this in 2026 with no attachment to a 1973 picture is going to find a taut, well-cast, unsentimental thriller that does exactly what it sets out to do.

📚 Against the book

Total separation, and Forsyth was right to be annoyed.

The Day of the Jackal is a 1971 novel about the OAS hiring an assassin to kill Charles de Gaulle, and its power comes from being a procedural about an outcome the reader already knows. The tension is entirely in method. There is no personal antagonist, no compromised informant, no chase in the ordinary sense, and the investigating officer is a mild bureaucrat with an index card system.

The film keeps the profession and discards the architecture. Adding a hunter with a personal history against the killer is precisely the move Forsyth spent his career refusing to make, and it is why the two things cannot be compared on the same axis.

The honest framing: the novel is a masterpiece of construction, the 1973 film is its faithful and very good translation, and the 1997 film is a nineties action thriller that borrowed a name it eventually had to modify. All three can be true. Forsyth kept writing this kind of story to the end of his career — The Kill List is the same architecture rebuilt for drones and metadata, four decades on.

📺 Three Jackals, and which one to watch

There are now three screen versions of this material, and they are not competing for the same viewer.

1973, Fred Zinnemann, Edward Fox. The faithful one. It follows Forsyth’s novel almost step for step, gives the assassin no backstory whatsoever, and generates its tension entirely from procedure and a ticking date. Edward Fox is superb precisely because he plays a blank. If you loved the book, this is the film of the book, and it is one of the best thrillers of the seventies.

1997, this one. The action film. Same profession, different everything, and a hunter with a personal history — the exact ingredient the novel refuses. Watch it for Willis being empty and for a decade’s worth of studio craft, not for Forsyth.

2024, the Sky and Peacock series with Eddie Redmayne. Adapted by Ronan Bennett, with Lashana Lynch as the British intelligence officer chasing him across Europe. It takes the third route: keep the assassin, move the story to the present, and give him a domestic life the novel would never have allowed. It was successful enough to be renewed, with a second season due in 2027.

The order that works is book, then 1973, then either of the others whenever you like. The novel and the Zinnemann film are the same object; the 1997 film and the series are separate things using a very good name.

👨‍👧 The dad perspective

This is a comfort-watch film, and there is no shame in that category.

It is the kind of thing that used to turn up on television on a Sunday afternoon and hold the room regardless of when you joined it. Competent people doing competent things, a clear objective, no mythology to remember, no prior films required, and a running time that respects your evening. There is a particular pleasure in a thriller that assumes nothing about what you have already watched — increasingly rare, and worth valuing.

The Gere subplot is the weakest strand and it is also the one that gives the film a pulse: a man who was very good at killing people for a cause, who has had a long time to think about it, being let out to do it once more. It is not deep. It is enough.

Watching with family: 16 and up. The violence is infrequent and genuinely cold, and one scene involving the weapon test is more disturbing than anything in the Bourne films.

A note on the ratings gap: we have this at 4.5 and the critical consensus has it near the floor. That is not a defence of it as an adaptation — it is a judgement of what is on screen when the novel is not in the room. Reasonable people land elsewhere.

Streaming: availability rotates. A Prime Video trial is the quickest way to see where it has ended up this month.

✅ Pros & cons

Is The Jackal (1997) worth watching?

Yes — a 4.5 out of 5 for us, and we are aware that is a long way from the critical consensus. As a nineties thriller it is slick, cold and enormously rewatchable. As an adaptation of Forsyth it does not exist.

Is it a remake of The Day of the Jackal?

Not meaningfully. It takes the idea of a nameless professional assassin and invents everything else — new target, new country, new decade, new plot. Forsyth and Fred Zinnemann, who directed the 1973 film, filed an injunction to stop Universal using the original title.

Why did critics hate it so much?

Largely because they measured it against the 1973 film, which is faithful, restrained and superb. Roger Ebert put it on his worst-of-1997 list and called it dumbed down. Taken on its own terms as an action thriller, that reception looks harsh now.

Should I watch the 1973 film instead?

Watch both, in that order. The 1973 version with Edward Fox is the proper adaptation and a genuinely great film. The 1997 one is a different genre wearing a similar name — enjoy it after, not instead.

Do I need to have read the book?

No, and it may actively help not to have. Readers who love the novel tend to spend the running time cataloguing what is missing, which is a poor way to watch a perfectly good thriller.