Spy-drama porn: Sky’s The Day of the Jackal reviewed

All the previewers have been drooling lasciviously over The Day of the Jackal reboot and, having seen the first three episodes, I quite understand why. This is coffee-table spy-drama porn perfectly calculated to satisfy all manner of lurid and exotic tastes.

There’s sniper-rifle-assembly porn; foreign-property porn (the Jackal’s gorgeous mountain retreat near Cadiz with a to-die-for infinity pool); fashion-nostalgia porn (especially the brown suede jacket worn with a red neckerchief in homage to the original, starring Edward Fox); far-right German politician’s head exploding in a pink mist as the heavy calibre sniper round reaches the end of its remarkable, unprecedented two-and-a-half-mile trajectory porn.

Essentially this is The Night Manager with a slightly different plot and a different Old Etonian as the lead – Eddie Redmayne instead of Tom Hiddleston – but with a similarly satisfying mix of locations (Munich, Belarus, Spain, London, Belfast, New York, etc.), expensive hotels and cafés, tense plotting and a light spray of gore. (The Night Manager, can you believe, came out as long ago as 2016, since when there has been nothing in this genre quite as good.)

Even if you’re not a fan of Redmayne (which I wasn’t until this), he is perfect in the title role as a posh-boy killer with a double life. At weekends, he’s the devoted, gentle, endearingly coy lover of his pretty Spanish girlfriend Nuria (Ursula Corbero) and father to a son with the improbably-clichéd name Carlito. During the week, he travels round the world blowing people’s heads off with his bespoke sniper rifle which can be disassembled to look like a briefcase you could easily get past airport security.

This side of the show is by far the most enjoyable.