Tuesday 28 March 2006

Movie Review - Day Of the Jackal

The first of the four movies I saw this weekend(25th / 26th March). A pretty old movie, I'm guessing 1960's/1970's. An extremist French organisation plans to assassinate the President of France by hiring a professional killer. They settle on an Englishman who prefers the name the Jackal.

The rest of the movie is an account of the Jackal's activities as he prepares the how and when of his attack. The movie settings keep shifting between England and France as the intelligence agencies of these two countries try to track down a man whose face and name remains a mystery. The French government hires a famous policeman to handle the search for this invisible Jackal and he does them proud by starting of with a search for all prominent assassination attempts in the last few years. They then cross checks the names they get to existing passport holders in the top economies of the world. And so on and so forth. And so they close the gap between the killer and themselves by tracing his every move and getting closer at each successive step, despite having a mole in their search engine who's an informer to the extremists.

The movie is based on the book by Fredrick Forsythe and was also remade into the movie 'The Jackal' starring Sidney Poitier, Bruce Willis and Richard Gere in the 1990's, although the later movie had a slightly different storyline (Russian wants to assassinate American) and had a noticeable soundtrack as well. In fact, the original movie was quite drab in places and was marked by an almost absent soundtrack. I guess the original was more focused on the investigation into and search for the killer while the later movie was a suspense /action/thriller catering to a modern audience. Makes you wonder how audiences have changed so much in a matter of decades.

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2 comments:

S.R.Ayyangar said...

This is a fantastic movie but sadly enough, I wonder why distributor has not re-released this movie for the new generation to appreciate.

Daniel D'Mello said...

Well, they did release it on DVD, but I don't think most people are too keen on watching slow movies without much of a soundtrack or action.

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