Of all the spy-thrillers I have watched, I seem to have zeroed on my favorite, The Spy starring Sacha Baron Cohen playing the character of Mossad’s top spy Eli Cohen. I never thought I would have to realign my thriller beliefs and include an assassin thriller into the world of spies. The British adaptation of the novel The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth surpasses my expectations at each and every aspect of the film making. The constant movement of the central character beyond borders while keeping up with his get ups and charades makes this assassin thriller a perfect choice for a spy thriller as well.
The assassin thrillers are never on my radar as almost all of them fail when it comes to the pacing of the scenes. They either tend to focus only on action or drive a flawed storyline with hurried climax. While this is true for most assassin thrillers, it is also the main reason why I don’t like most of the spy thrillers. The human angle that justifies the characterization is generally missing. But, that too shouldn’t become a hurdle in storytelling. Slow Horses on Apple TV and Black Doves on Netflix didn’t impress me mainly because of that. They just focussed too much on the human angle. The perfect balance is something that the script demands.
Ronan Bennett, the creator of The Day of the Jackal, wrote a script that handles emotions well while simultaneously builds a perfect character arc for our modern day jackal played by Eddie Redmayne. Ronan figured a way to keep the thrill of action alive for us with the realistic way of showing how our jackal deals with his personal and professional challenges. Ronan never left out the human angle in the characterization of the modern day Jackal. His script takes care of all the emotional struggles that our assassin has to undergo. Just to highlight, the jackal never looked clumsy when he killed professionally but his struggle becomes more evident especially towards the end when he has to unnecessarily kill some old couple. Even for that short stint, the ample screen space given to the elderly couple worked wonders and gave way for the emotions that I was craving for.
The evident struggle when to call it quits drives the season 1 for both show’s protagonist and antagonist. It’s unusual but I felt the need to keep the show’s antagonist story relevant for the longest time possible and in fact felt the need to end the script for our protagonist, Bianca Pullman, an MI6 agent, played by Lashana Lynch. Unfortunately, the last episode does satisfy my needs but I now feel if this is due to the urge to pull out our assassin and reinstate him as a spy in the upcoming season. Maybe, that’s the reason why I blurred the lines between a perfect spy and assassin thriller.
The other reason was somehow based on my instinct to keep hearing the name Belarus in almost all modern day spy thrillers these days. Almost all of them do call Belarus out but this series does it several times over. Though I didn’t feel the need to call a small operation in Belarus several times in the plot, I understand in our current times the mention of Belarus is indeed important. Hollywood does seem to be obsessed with it. Michael Fassbender’s new project The Agency does that too and so there isn’t any escape for me yet.