The Day Of The Jackal takes each Bond cliche and makes it dazzle once more to be ‘cool as Connery, charming as Moore, lethal as Craig’, says CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

The Day Of The Jackal (Sky Atlantic)

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An open-top sports car on a cliff-edge road beside the Med. At the wheel, a young woman with her hair flowing and lovelight in her eyes – at her side a ruthless assassin.

Eddie Redmayne in this sensational remake of The Day Of The Jackal, takes every James Bond movie cliche and gives it a polish and spin to make it dazzle again. Urbane, sardonic, inscrutable and old-school… cool as Connery, charming as Moore, deadly as Craig.

This isn’t just the best TV thriller since The Night Manager. It’s also Redmayne staking his claim to be the next 007 and blowing all the competition away.

There’s only one question left – is he too ginger to be Bond?

Screenwriter Ronan Bennett is clearly a devotee of classic thrillers, because he has transported Frederick Forsyth‘s 1971 bestseller to the 21st century without losing any of its native grit. He delivers car chases and stake outs, gun battles and explosions, political wrangles and terrorist brutality.

If you believed, like me, that intelligent, high-octane action serials were no longer possible in a woke world, The Day Of The Jackal proves us wrong.

Famously, the novel has become a handbook for would-be assassins, because of its meticulous descriptions of ‘tradecraft’, and this adaptation is faithful to the Forsyth style.

We see every step of the Jackal’s preparations for each kill, beginning with an ambush at an office. To gain entry, Redmayne’s character – we never know his name – not only disguises himself as the grouchy janitor but imitates his accent, parroting his bad-tempered grumble.

What appears at first to be a straightforward murder assignment turns out to be anything but. The job takes a series of shocking twists, yet every time we think the killer has been wrong-footed, he turns out to have planned it this way.

Even when he seems to be cornered on the roof of a tower block, with police mustering below, he has all the smoke bombs and abseiling ropes he needs to make his escape. And that’s all before the opening credits roll.

The Jackal is an amoral superman. He kills for money and, as he tells his clients, has no interest in why they want their enemies dead.

But in this retelling (unlike the 1973 movie starring Edward Fox), he is also a devoted family man, with a Spanish wife, a one-year-old son and an estate in rural Cadiz.

His adoring partner Nuria, played by Ursula Corbero, is fiery and filled with jealous suspicions, which adds a realistic layer of complexity to the Jackal’s coldly rational methods.

In the book, his ultimate target is the French head of state Charles de Gaulle. Clearly, Sky Atlantic is not going to commission a series about a plot to assassinate France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron – for one thing, it would be in bad taste and for another, no one would care enough to keep watching.

This time, the man in the crosshairs is a figure in the mould of Elon Musk, a tech entrepreneur named Ulle Dag Charles or UDC (Khalid Abdalla). He’s developing an app that promises complete transparency in banking, so that financial transactions cannot be hidden. This, he says, will create ‘global economic justice’.

Personally, I can’t see that software catching on. You don’t need to be a shadowy billionaire to feel the world doesn’t have to know how you earn or spend every cent.

Charles Dance, as an especially shadowy billionaire named Timothy Winthorp, is so keen to delete this app permanently that he sends an underling to hire the Jackal’s services for $100million. This leads to a series of meetings that are never quite face-to-face – the assassin’s first greeting is invariably, ‘Don’t turn around.’

On his trail is British intelligence expert and gun geek Bianca (Lashana Lynch, who co-starred in the last Bond movie, No Time To Die). She brings echoes of Killing Eve: a maverick woman within MI6, conflicted about the morality of her work but so committed to it that she’s driving her husband away.

Bianca is answerable to a female chief whose absence of emotion is thoroughly psychopathic, and a department head (Chukwudi Iwuji) who couldn’t look more like a mole if he had whiskers and velvet fur.

No one in MI6 wants to hear that the assassin terrorising Europe is probably ex-British Army, or that his rifle appears to be a British prototype. But Bianca is determined to prove it, by blackmailing the wife of a Loyalist thug in Belfast and imprisoning her daughter.

Born in Belfast, writer Bennett served time in the 1970s for his suspected involvement in an IRA murder and armed robbery (before his conviction was quashed). The scenes in which Bianca confronts the frightened, bitter Alison (Kate Dickie) in a city clothes store, and her subsequent attempts to get the information MI6 needs, have a cruelly convincing realism.

Lynch has to work hard to keep us from disliking her. She bullies and betrays Alison, while constantly letting down her own family. It’s only the fact she can’t forgive herself that lets us excuse her.

But it’s not hard to admire the Jackal – Redmayne is so thoroughly English, with a splash of the debonair and a hint of self-deprecation that prevents his infallibility from becoming an annoyance.

Some of his murders are utterly ruthless but we can see he gets no satisfaction from these: they’re just part of the job and, as Paul McCartney sang about Bond, ‘He’s gonna do it well… he’s gonna give the other fella hell.’

And what’s the next job? It might just be on His Majesty’s secret service.