It was a poor remake, poorly cast and poorly executed.
Posted on 02/05/2018 8:31:13 AM PST by Rummyfan
One of the sadder aspects of recent revelations has been having to confront the glum reality that real-life national security capers are nowhere near as cool as their movie equivalents. For example, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton kept her nation's secrets in a server in some guy's toilet in an apartment in Colorado. I'd just seen Mission: Impossible 12 or whatever it was in which half the screen time is devoted to figuring out how Tom Cruise is going to break in to the secure computer facility. In real life, all you need is a plumber's get-up. I was doing some event or other out in Hollywood around that time and took the opportunity to re-enact the big scene from Cruise's picture but re-located to the sewer line to Server Boy's toilet.
Now we have the Christopher Steele "dossier". If Steele isn't on Putin's payroll, he ought to be. For it's hard to imagine in James Jesus Angleton's wilderness-of-mirrors heyday you could have distracted Washington half so easily with anything as ludicrous as this "dossier". So I thought it would be fun, for our Saturday movie date, to find a Russo-American thriller whose fictions are as ridiculous as the Steele fiasco. That's all but impossible - until I remembered a Bruce Willis remake from 1997, Michael Caton-Jones' The Jackal.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
It was a poor remake, poorly cast and poorly executed.
The title character bore no resemblance to Carlos Ramirez but I like this movie and will still watch it on cable. A lot of the story line is hokey but I like the remote controlled automatic 50 cal. acquisition sequence and the attempted assassination sequence in D.C. Of course Richard Gearbox’s role and performance were horrid and the only way this movie would have been better for me is if Willis had killed him in the subway and then escaped. Maybe to come after Obama a few years later.
I highly recommend Forsyth's book and the 1971 movie....
True. The movie was subpar. But, the intro credits were the best I've ever seen, complete with Massive Attack's rocking "Suprepredator."
The movie was downhill from there.
Motion seconded and passed.
Robert Ludlum put the Jackal in his “The Bourne Ultimatum”...I am reading it now. I should get a medal for finishing it...it is good, but the microplots are unbelievably complex and go on and on.
Thanks, had read the book but seen neither movie.
The opposite with Odessa File — how does it compare with the book?
The character from Day of the Jackal has nothing to do with Carlos Rameriz.
“I highly recommend Forsyth’s book and the 1971 movie”
Concur.
To be fair, Willis is a top notch actor and if there were failings with the movie (there were), they had to do with the script and the directing. I had just taken in stride that this remake, like almost all others, would be less of a movie than the original due to many factors.. the rotten scriptwriting, the dumbing down of the story line to allow the new movie goers to keep up, the rotten scriptwriting, the dependence on showy computer graphics as a substitute for a good story line.. and of course, the rotten scriptwriting..
Dogs of War was another great read by Forsyth. It is a shame the old stuff is dated. The younguns can’t relate..
Sprawl!
IMHO, the book The Odessa File is far superior to the movie. Some major book plot points and subplots are just not in the movie.
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