Comment:
Similar in many ways to last year's The Saint, Bruce Willis' The Jackal doesn't manage to add much to the genre of action-espionage movies and while the Val Kilmer movie was, at least, enjoyable, The Jackal is too flawed to emerge from the moltitude of useless action movies.

Starting from a debatable scene in Moscow, the action soon to Helsinky, London, Montreal and Chicago following the moves of the Jackal, a mysterious killer and master of disguise who is paid by the Russian Mafia to kill an important person in the US. The american government tries to catch him with the help of an ex-member of IRA played by Richard Gere, who seems to be the only one who can recognise the Jackal since they both worked together in the past.

I have been fairly intrigued by the plot and by the quite complex way the Jackal organised the murder, even the subplots seemed quite interesting and in one occasion I've been positively surprised by a rather unpredictable event. Unfortunately there were a lot of problems in the story that can only be partially covered by the action and by the (more or less) charismatic actors.

In fact there are too many plot holes, the supposedly expert Jackal seems far too easy to track down and he actually only shows stupid behaviours since he always manages to waste time and lose his advantage over the government agents (who are admittedly helped by a sort of clairvoyant Richard Gere!). For example, where's the point in aiming the victim so precisely with a very powerful weapon that can fire a burst of 20mm bullets?

Let alone the very poor disguising tricks (Bruce Willis has always been perfectly recognisable!), there have been a few surprisingly poor visual effects, including an obviously fake building and a risible close encounter with a subway train. As usual, computer, Internet and mobile phones are used and abused in every situation.

The ending is somewhat irritating and the movie reaches its worst moment there. The last few scenes exhibit all the deficiencies of the movie, the lack of good ideas, the stupidity of the characters and the doubtfullness of the happenings. In short, while The Jackal doesn't fall to the annoying levels of this year's Face/Off, it is still a fairly pointless and dull movie.