Holiday Spies: “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Agency,” “Black Doves”

Nothing breeds imitation like success—so it goes for fashion trends, pop music, and spy shows on TV. A few years back, Apple+’s Slow Horses updated the spy thriller for our current era of cynicism and skepticism, mocking the incompetence of the institutions tasked with keeping us safe while indulging in the customary twists and stratagems. Slow Horses‘ underdog success (nine Emmy nominations and one win) has encouraged streamers like Netflix, Showtime and Peacock to launch their own takes on special agents this holiday season. Like Slow Horses, they’re all based in London, the ancestral home of top-notch spooks everywhere, and they’ve all been renewed for second seasons, ensuring that our spy craze of the moment will last a bit longer.

Not surprisingly, two of the three shows are updates on existing properties (for how would TV execs rest their weary heads at night if they didn’t have remakes to fall back on?). The glossiest among them is The Day of the Jackal, Peacock’s reimagining of the 1973 Fred Zinnemann film based on the Frederick Forsyth novel. (The campy 1997 remake Jackal is anything but classic, but it contains moments both hilarious (Bruce Willis posing as a gay cruiser) and painful (Richard Gere attempting an Irish accent).) The original Jackal, based loosely on the real-life attempted assassination of French President Charles De Gaulle, is a masterclass of a procedural thriller, and a study in contrasts: the Jackal (Edward Fox), a slick assassin with sartorial and improvisational flair, versus the French commissaire (Michel Lonsdale) who keeps up with the killer stride for stride in his own dogged fashion. Under Zinnemann’s pared-down direction, the game is everything in The Day of the Jackal, the characters summarized by their approach. Fox is defined by his smarts and ruthlessness while the hangdog Lonsdale is sure and methodical, both of them servicing a plot that ties itself into a suspenseful knot of timing, coincidences and counter-moves.

These days, the fun of watching two opponents going at it like chessmasters is no longer enough; audiences have grown accustomed (addicted?) to character drama, and so this latest version of Jackal pads itself out with existential angst and family friction, topped off with globetrotting pizzazz, as we sample European hotspots. (The title sequence, underscored by Celeste’s torchy “Who I Am,” slinks away with a loungy Bondian vibe.) In temperament, Eddie Redmayne channels some of the efficiency and clamminess of Fox’s Jackal, but this time he’s a tortured soul with a traumatic backstory as well as a girlfriend (Úrsula Corberó) and son from whom he’s determined to conceal his true identity. Likewise, his pursuer is now an obsessive MI-6 spook named Bianca (Lashana Lynch, fresh from her stint as a double-o in No Time to Die) who tends to ignore her superiors, torture suspects, and get innocents killed in her rush to track down her quarry, even as her home life disintegrates under the strain. Showrunner Ronan Bennett (Top Boy) is no stranger to compromised antagonists, and he devotes much of the series’ running time to the Jackal and Bianca’s parallel personal woes even as the story goes hyperbolic: the Jackal is no longer just an ace hitman but also a master of outlandish disguises (take that, Ethan Hunt!) and a sniper savant who can take out a target from two miles away, while his employers aren’t the desperate military revolutionaries of Forsyth’s novel but an all-knowing multinational firm who’s eager to erase a tech-bro CEO (Khalid Abdalla) before he throws the world’s politics and economy into disarray.

The Day of the Jackal‘s plot gestures towards the straightforward procedural elements of the original film, but soon abandons them in favor of surface pleasures: the way Redmayne goes rock-still as he stares down his sniper scope, the soaring shots of Cádiz and Croatia and Talinn, Redmayne sauntering about in an ascot tie just like Edward Fox did fifty years ago, back when people actually wore ascot ties. Meanwhile, Bennett works hard to beef up Lynch’s side of the story, lingering on her work-life struggles with her husband (Sule Rimi) and daughter (Florisa Kamara), and throwing in a none-too-exciting mole hunt at MI-6 HQ. All of this is meant to make Bianca relatable if not appealing, but little of these traits come through in Lynch’s clenched performance. In most other respects, Jackal is cursory at best: scenes with Abdalla and his minions come off as a grade-schooler’s attempt to explain high finance, Charles Dance materializes every so often to snarl at underlings as the Jackal’s rich bastard employer, and songs hammer away on the soundtrack to emphasize plot turns. At one point, The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” drops just as a character’s trickery is exposed—a good indication of how subtle the whole enterprise is.

But if The Day of the Jackal is too absurd to convince as a straightforward thriller, its heroes and villains too busy striking poses to persuade as characters, it nevertheless has a propulsive pull, especially whenever human drama is relegated to the background and we focus on the simple thrills of hunter versus hunted. The first episode features a sneaky concealed sniper’s rifle; at season’s end Redmayne pulls out a hulking cannon that requires a speedboat to transport. That same erosion of good sense and realism embodies the new Jackal as he’s elevated to near-superhuman invincibility, but if you can ignore the implausibilities, the series is trashy fun that goes down easier than your standard po-faced prestige thriller.

On the other hand, prestige drips from The Agency, Showtime’s entry in the spy streaming wars. The production is stuffed with high-caliber talent across the board: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere in the cast, writer Jez Butterworth, director Joe Wright (Atonement, Darkest Hour). Where Jackal indulges in outlandish plot machinations, The Agency strains to convince with verisimilitude, with operational code names and cryptic references to sleeper agents and hidden pasts thick in the air. The action centers on Fassbender’s “Martian,” a deep-cover CIA agent pulled back to home base in London after a six-year assignment. Martian is a super-competent, self-assured sort, but while he may sail through his debriefing with caustic wit—”You’re worried that I may have somehow become sane. Well, I can assure you, the person sitting in front of you is, was, will remain purely, deeply, identifiably 100% nuts”—the flickers of strain that tug at Fassbender’s granite features suggests that he hasn’t left his double life behind. Soon enough that former life shows up in the form of Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), his erstwhile flame from his days posing as a mild-mannered professor. Flaunting protocol, Martian resumes his affair with her in London, leading to much suspicion, apprehension and paranoia on both sides.

Spinning around Fassbender are a host of subplots, including a compromised Ukranian operation headed by Wright’s Delta Force brother-in-law (Edward Holcroft), a fresh recruit (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) tasked with getting cozy with an Iranian scientist, and a missing operative who may or may not have spilled the beans about key operations to the Russians. Rather than slick action scenes, the focus is on interoffice power plays, the psychological and emotional toll of the spy life, every conversation an interrogation or insinuation. If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s for good reason: The Agency is a remake of the French series The Bureau (aka Le bureau des legends), one of the finest spy series you’ll see this side of the Cold War, with every major story point and character beat replicated. But while The Bureau sneaks up on you with crisp, matter-of-fact storytelling that coils around you like a snake over five seasons’ worth of twists and surprises, The Agency, at least so far, leans on atmosphere and Butterworth’s near-portentous dialogue. Any scant bits of humor are supplied by John Magaro as a put-upon handler of agents and two bumbling minders (Andrew Brooke and Adam Nagaitis) assigned to keep watch over Martian; otherwise, the mood is as gray as the corridors and flats Fassbender and his colleagues inhabit.

Shot in a beguiling mix of shadows and stark lighting, or through competing reflections in panes of glass, The Agency has the look of Something Very Important, and even when the dialogue gets expository and in-your-face, Fassbender, Waterston, Wright and Gere are adroit enough to tap-dance through it. Still, for all the skullduggery and serpentine storytelling lifted straight from The Bureau, The Agency proves that no matter how close you stick to the original material, something always gets lost in translation. The show is preoccupied with keeping it real but niggling questions accumulate: Shouldn’t Martian go straight to Langley for debriefing after his six-year assignment instead of hanging around a benighted CIA outpost in London? Why does Gere pronounce JSOC as “J-S-O-C” instead of “J-sock”? Why do Wright and Gere clash over a proposed budget of $100,000 for extraction of a key informant when the CIA probably spends that much on a continental breakfast for the team? The answer, of course, is that given the location, the brittle tone, Fassbender’s presence and the Brit production talent in play, The Agency was clearly meant to be set in MI-6. One can see the same story making more sense within the confines of a beleaguered, impoverished Majesty’s Secret Service—but alas, as a Showtime-funded production, the Yanks must be kept happy, so the CIA it is. (A similar fate befell Berlin Station, another recent show sporting a mordant English view of the spygame that camouflaged itself as a CIA thriller, its Brit actors wrestling with American accents.) Add that bit of dissonance to the sluggish pacing and you have a show that’s easy to admire on merit, yet holds you at arm’s length. It will be fascinating to see if The Agency develops into its own thing or follows the well-trod path of The Bureau to the bitter end, but based on its first few episodes, it wouldn’t hurt if it put a bit more pep in its step.

Pep is not the problem when it comes to Black Doves, which in many ways is the frothiest of the three series. Befitting a Netflix production, the story feels as if it was constructed via algorithm: bring in the Pride and Prejudice crowd by casting English rose Keira Knightley against type as a badass spy, cover the LGBT base with Ben Whishaw as a wry hitman with a boyfriend problem, and throw in splattery violence and sniggering humor to appeal to Tarantino-ites. The series starts in fine secret agent-ish fashion with a trio of ominous murders that hints at a grand conspiracy, but the deaths hit on a personal level for Knightley’s Helen, an agent for a nebulous spy ring who’s infiltrated the life of Britain’s Secretary of Defence (Andrew Buchan) to the point that they’re now married, with two adorable kids. When she learns one of the victims was her lover (Andrew Koji), it sets off a quest for vengeance that stretches from 10 Downing Street all the way down to street-level drug runners. Assisting Helen in her investigation is her old mate Sam (Whishaw), a triggerman (“It’s a term that’s been accepted as gender-neutral,” he shrugs) who’s back in London after several years away due to a past tragedy. As the duo shoot and bicker their way through gangsters, thugs and assassins, Black Doves opens up to touch on Chinese-Anglo-American relations, the lure of domesticity, the downside of loyalty, the cutthroat rivalries of killers and bosses, the struggle to maintain one’s identity (and sanity) in the midst of living a lie, and the karmic bounce-back of revenge, while finding time to insert at least two brawls or gunfights per episode.

Black Doves isn’t a story as much as a mishmash of plot pivots and tropes thrown at a wall. Needless to say, not everything sticks. Though Knightley is a sympathetic presence, her character doesn’t track: one moment she’s a ferocious killer who knows all the angles, and in the next she’s an aggrieved innocent who can’t comprehend what she’s gotten herself into. It doesn’t help that she’s often pitted against Sarah Lancashire as a sniffy spy-boss hoarding her own secrets; Lancashire’s character might be a cardboard cutout, but her all-knowing smile speaks volumes. Whishaw fares better as the forlorn bagman who’s torn between romance with a hunky artist (Omari Douglas) and the exigencies of his job. His brows in a perpetual furrow, too accustomed to unhappy endings to countenance the thought of happiness, a decent man in an indecent profession, Whishaw holds back instead of going big, bringing Shakespearean broodiness (including a Hamlet-esque scene in which he’s ordered to off his own dad) along with a welcome touch of lightness to his performance. It’s a good thing he goes small, because everything else in Black Doves is writ large, from the smart-ass killers (Ella Lily Hyland and Gabrielle Creevy) who are Helen and Sam’s nemeses (and eventual comrades) to the chain-smoking underworld matron (Kathryn Hunter) who speaks in extended croaks and holds a marker on Sam.

Breezy and vague when it comes to actual spying, Black Doves leans into its black comic outlook, lingering on incongruities: Keira Knightley’s graceful mug drenched with an assassin’s blood after a shotgun blast, or Johnny Cash’s “Little Drummer Boy” going pa-rum-pum-pum-pum in time with gunfire. No stranger to London’s mean streets, showrunner Joe Barton (Giri/Haji) supplies a foggy grit to the proceedings, with the show’s Christmas setting serving as both undercurrent and subtext: in the season of giving, what could be more magnaminous than killing someone else’s enemy and assuming the karmic burden? Black Doves runs through a multitude of one-liners and flashy fights to reach that conclusion, but when it arrives, it’s a surprisingly delicate, indelible moment, well-played by Whishaw, that supersedes all the semi-snarky, semi-melodramatic stylings. Black Doves‘ merry hijinks begin and end with a rendition of the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” and like the Pogues, the show may be a little too punch-drunk for its own good at times, but its heart is definitely in the right place. ■