Eddie Redmayne as Jackal (Photo: Supplied)
Eddie Redmayne as Jackal (Photo: Supplied)

Pop CultureNovember 22, 2024

Review: The Day of the Jackal is a riveting and ridiculous ride

Eddie Redmayne as Jackal (Photo: Supplied)
Eddie Redmayne as Jackal (Photo: Supplied)

Eddie Redmayne’s globe-trotting assassin thriller on TVNZ is worth putting your phone down for.

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This is a vulnerable thing to say as someone who often writes about television for a job, but boy am I really struggling to stay engaged with television these days. The slightest moment of confusion or boredom and I am lured back to my phone to enjoy thousands of videos of llamas pretending to sing emo songs, memes about the trials of rescue dog ownership, and group chats oozing with gossip. How could Industry ever compete?

Last week I interviewed veteran television reviewer Diana Wichtel for My Life in TV (coming tomorrow), and it turns out that even she struggles with her attention span and second-screening. Wichtel described us all as so “culturally drenched” nowadays that retaining interest and even basic information about a TV show is harder than ever (even Thee Diana Wichtel once watched a whole season of a show before realising she’d already seen it).

But in this swamp of confusion and distraction, every now and again a TV show grabs you by both ears and wrenches you out of the social media muck, sometimes even demanding that you binge watch episode after episode while the llamas on Instagram sing to an empty crowd. TVNZ’s new spy thriller The Day of the Jackal is that kind of show, and the perfect factory reset button to hit if you are looking for utterly riveting and utterly ridiculous thrills.

Starring Eddie Redmayne as a high-flying assassin, who hilariously insists on being called “Jackal”, The Day of the Jackal follows him around the globe as he evades capture from the shit-hot MI6 agent Bianca (Lashana Lynch) chasing his fluffy Jackal tail. Already known for being a chameleon (sometimes pushing his ambitions too far), Redmayne’s unnerving and slightly alien energy works perfectly as he adopts endless disguises and personas on the job.

For example, the jaw-dropping opening sequence (which reminded me a lot of the spectacle and rubbery faces of The Dark Knight opener) features Redmayne going incognito as an old German janitor. Soon enough it becomes clear that he’s packing more than mops in his cleaning cart, as he carries out an unwieldy assassination with mucho collateral damage. But it’s his next victim – killed by a single shot from two miles away – that gets the attention of Bianca at MI6.

So begins a worldwide game of cat and mouse, where the cat is a world-leading expert in arms and ammunition, and the mouse has a world-leading collection of transformative bald caps. Both are so addicted to their top secret jobs that their family life suffers – in episode one, we find out that The Jackal has a Mrs Jackal and a Junior Jackal holed up in a Mediterranean mansion somewhere, and Bianca has to miss a parent-teacher meeting to pursue a Jackal-related lead.

Where Mr and Mrs Smith, another spy thriller rebooted for the streaming age, chose to pack the script with modern witty repartee, Jackal is stone cold serious. Sometimes that leads to moments of unintentional comedy, such as when the Jackal meets a potential client looking like one of the three blind mice from Shrek. Other times, plot points and character decisions don’t entirely make sense, or are just absolutely ridiculous (why would you stash all of that in your marital home?).

Watching The Day of the Jackal reminds me of being glued, mouth agape, to the Idris Elba mile-high thriller Hijack last year. Huge budget, huge movie star, huge stupendous story that would probably, if we’re honest, work better as a movie. But given that Jackal is reportedly the most expensive production ever made by Sky in the UK, I suppose they have to put all that cash somewhere. And if it continues to keep me off my phone for even an hour, that’s probably money well spent.

Watch The Day of the Jackal here on TVNZ+

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Pop CultureNovember 21, 2024

‘Deserves a Bafta’: After the Party premieres in the UK to five-star reviews 

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The acclaimed New Zealand drama has just premiered on TV in the United Kingdom, and the five-star reviews are already flowing in. 

Six months after it was called a “blistering” “tour de force” by Australian critics, and nearly a year since The Spinoff declared it the best drama New Zealand has ever made, After the Party has premiered today in the United Kingdom to equally rave reviews. The “gritty, wrenching and highly confronting” drama stars Robyn Malcolm as Wellington teacher Penny, who accuses her husband Phil (Scottish actor Peter Mullan) of a sex crime at a boozy house party.

What happens next is a six-part white knuckle ride through one deeply fallible yet doggedly determined woman’s quest to unearth the truth, while everyone else desperately tries to move on. 

So how have critics in the United Kingdom responded to our “dark, tense and highly provocative drama” after it aired on Channel 4 just a few hours ago? And did they also enjoy watching Phil Spencer’s New Zealand Best Homes, which followed it in the programming? We trawled the reviewsphere and found nothing but rave reviews. 

The Guardian UK: ‘Hands down the best acting on TV all year’ (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)

Lucy Mangan’s five-star review for The Guardian opens with glowing praise for Robyn Malcolm (“It’s a bravura performance from the very beginning”), continues with glowing praise for Robyn Malcolm (“surely the performance of the year”), and ends with glowing praise for Robyn Malcolm (“What a role. What an actor. What a performance”). And who can really blame her? 

Drawing comparisons with Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood and Mare of Easttown Mare Sheehan, Mangan said that Penny is a type of middle-aged female character “who has seen too much of life not to know precisely how awful it can be.” Praising Malcolm, “whom you believe utterly”, Mangan describes “a portrait of a woman whose inability to compromise, to sigh and turn away from perceived danger or injustice, is both a flaw and heroic.” 

Peter Mullen and Malcolm in After the Party (Photo: TVNZ)

Beyond the complex middle-aged protagonists, Mangan also made another parallel with the “textured layering” and “immersive quality” of award-winning dramas Mare and Happy Valley: “absolute authenticity through and through.” The execution of the After the Party is “brilliant”, the supporting characters “uniformly well-rounded” but “Malcolm is the centrepiece.” Perhaps the only negative here in this total rave review is that she called Wellington a “small town”. Boo!

The Telegraph: ‘Robyn Malcolm deserves a Bafta’ (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)

Writing for The Telegraph, Anita Singh was also shouting from the rooftops about Malcolm’s performance, even suggesting Bafta buzz. “The best TV performance of the year is by an actor most British viewers won’t recognise, in a New Zealand production that most won’t see,” she writes. “The actor is Robyn Malcolm in After the Party; if Kate Winslet or Sarah Lancashire played this role even half as well, they’d have the Baftas all sewn up.”

While Singh admits she had been reluctant to watch the series due to the subject matter – “nobody’s idea of a good time” – she soon came round. “Penny is the type to come straight out and say what she thinks, unafraid of the repercussions. She’s earthy, unembarrassable and gloriously no-nonsense,” she writes. Unlike The Guardian, she resists the urge to call our capital city a small town: “the setting, a very windy Wellington, feels fresh to British eyes.” 

Another five star review, centered around a tour de force performance: “Penny feels messy and real, and Malcolm’s phenomenal performance will keep you hooked.”

iNews: ‘The best Kiwi drama since Top of the Lake’ (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)

Another five-starrer, this time comparing After the Party with Top of the Lake, another world class drama export. “Both are twisty and atmospheric, both have plots spun around ugly pasts rearing up in the present – and both star actors Robyn Malcolm and Peter Mullan,” Rachel Sigee writes. But After the Party… confidently establishes itself as its own entity: a blistering and intelligent drama of tangled morals, anchored by a remarkable central performance.”

Malcolm in a scene from After the Party (Photo: TVNZ)

Great! What could possibly go wrong here! “Marshall is immediately captivating as Penny,” Sigee continued, in a bigger national insult than calling Wellington a small town. “A woman of an age that television tends only to be interested in if they are extremely wealthy.” Even with the name slip up, iNews stuck the landing with this: “As challenging as it is compelling, this miniseries is a modern masterpiece.” Marshall, come and get your Bafta now. 

The Times: ‘Beautifully controlled’ (⭐⭐⭐⭐)

Okay take a deep breath and put down your pitchforks everyone, but The Times only dished out a measly four stars. “After the Party has been billed by some as the best TV drama of the year,” Carol Midgley begins. “That might be overstating things a shade, but it is certainly excellent.” 

Singling out the opening sequence in particular, where Penny delivers a frank monologue about pornography to a class of teenage boys, Midgley calls it “the best opening six minutes to a drama series I have seen in some time” thanks to both a “scorching performance” and “great dialogue”. More praise for Malcolm’s performance: “It is so nutty and layered, sometimes making Penny likeable, sometimes not: this is a performance so prevailing and so lacking in vanity as to compare to Kate Winslet’s in Mare of Easttown.” 

Midgley also heaped praise on the “beautifully controlled” storytelling, with the viewer only piecing the offending incident together through flashbacks. “Normally I hate flashbacks but these are well done,” she adds. A tougher customer who, although she found the final twist “a rug-puller that is not nuanced” still says “this is a series worth every hour of your time.” 

Watch After the Party here on TVNZ+.