The Day of the Jackal

It gilds the lily with unnecessary backstory and peripheral melodrama allegedly designed to “flesh out” characters, and you’re left with an epic amount of gorgeous, globetrotting Mid TV.

There’s a great two-hour movie in this Peacock series, or possibly even a great four-hour miniseries. But for the six episodes in the middle, the season becomes cougars all the way down, as one digression after another to keeps pulling at the ostensibly fine thread that is the core plot.

Padded with sluggish sequences and uninteresting subplots, this aggravatingly inert affair lumbers its way toward an unsatisfying finish line, in the process squandering a captivating performance by Eddie Redmayne as its chameleonic protagonist.

The makeup, cinematography, and editing all work together to help make the Jackal’s disguises convincing and impressive, and the action scenes are thankfully not too dark to see or too quickly cut together to tell what’s going on. And yet, none of that is what I’ll remember about “The Day of the Jackal.” Instead, I’ll remember how long it felt to sit through it and how painfully it overextended its story.

A prestige thriller that starts promisingly but spins its wheels through its midsection before culminating in a pair of clunky episodes that derail the production even further while threatening a second season.