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90With its strong premise, a couple of fine performances and highly polished tooling, The Jackal scores as an involving high-tech thriller that occasionally hits peaks of pulsating excitement.
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60It's a good job this works so well as a machine-made movie, because its grasp of political realities is nebulous.
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60Plotted densely enough to make the lulls forgivable, this movie concerns a contract killer (Bruce Willis) who employs several small-business owners to craft his super-high-tech weapons and the many accessories that enable him to assume multiple identities.
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50Amusing performances -- especially from Willis, who takes on a new personality with each new hairstyle -- can't disguise the fact that the film is basically a pastiche of recent movies.
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50Actually, the more distance the studio places between the two films, the better, because the 1997 production can't hold a candle to the 1973 release, and an attempted comparison only makes the new Bruce Willis/Richard Gere vehicle look worse.
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50Though consistently handsome, the film never quite achieves the shallow but hugely seductive intensity of its MTV-style opening credits sequence.
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50A trashy, frenetic remake of Fred Zinnemann's 1973 The Day of the Jackal, The Jackal is mired in blood, cheap shocks, and a random network of improbability.
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50The Jackal isn't much--it certainly isn't up to the 1973 Fred Zinnemann Day of the Jackal it loosely adapts and updates--but it does offer the fascination of watching big-ticket actors attempt to spin their images.
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50The Jackal, like most expensive thrillers nowadays, knows how to do gadgets, pyrotechnics, underground subway chases and panicked crowd scenes. But except for Mr. Gere's uphill battle, it has only the vaguest idea of how to do people.
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50To enjoy it, however, you have to do the mental equivalent of squinting your eyes, so the credibility is only fuzzily ridiculous.
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At best, The Jackal is an uninspired, by-the-numbers action thriller.
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40The Jackal is based on a fabrication so absurd that it almost made me laugh out loud.
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38The Jackal, on the other hand, impressed me with its absurdity. There was scarcely a second I could take seriously.
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30Not since "Peacemaker" have we witnessed such a battle of wits.
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30This remake of Fred Zinnemann's well-regarded Day of the Jackal (1973) not only fails to match the modest entertainment value of Frederick Forsyth's workmanlike source novel, but actually moves into late contention for the title of 1997's most tedious movie.
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30Sporadically effective, it appears not to have particularly excited the people who made it, and that lackadaisical quality is a drawback.
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30Michael Caton-Jones' pompous and coarsely stupid inflation of what remains a superior thriller, Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973).
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25What keeps coming to mind throughout The Jackal is that for what it cost to make this movie you could probably pay some nice hit man to eliminate everyone at Universal who thought making the movie would be a good idea, and still have enough left over to throw one of those hit man parties and have a really great time.
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10The usually reliable director Michael Caton-Jones hasn't a clue how to freshen up such stale material.
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0Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones continues to fritter away the last traces of his talent with this ugly variant on Fred Zinnemann's 1973 original, The Day of the Jackal.
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