Unclear and Present Danger - The Jackal

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched the (rightfully) forgotten thriller The Jackal, a loose adaptation of The Day of the Jackal directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, Sidney Poitier and Diane Venora.In The Jackal, Willis plays the titular assassin, a feared hitman who has been hired by Russian mobsters to assassinate the director of the FBI, in retaliation for American activity in Russia. As the Jackal makes his arrangements, FBI Deputy Director Carter Preston (Poitier) and Russian Police Major Valentina Koslova (Venora) scour their sources for leads in a search that leads to imprisoned IRA sniper Declan Mulqueen (Gere). Mulqueen knows the Jackal and will help the FBI find him — if he gets his freedom in return. What follows is a chase across the world, as Carter, Koslova and Mulqueen race to stop the Jackal, whose ultimate target is the First Lady of the United States.The tagline for The Jackal was “How do you stop an assassin who has no identity?”You can find The Jackal to rent or purchase on Apple TV or Amazon Prime.Episodes come out roughly every two weeks, so we’ll see you then with an episode on Tomorrow Never Dies, the second entry in Pierce Brosnan’s run as James Bond.Over on Patreon, we have an episode on the first Mobile Suit Gundam compliation film. We’re also doing a weekly politics show on the news of the day. Joining us by heading over to patreon.com/unclearpod. Our producer is Connor Lynch and our artwork is by Rachel Eck.

They call him the Jackal. They don't know who he is. The CIA can't track it. But we have a physical description. At least that isn't going to change. He's got a lot of faces, this woman. More Kedgiddy member has ever seen him. But he's about to meet his match.

Declan Bull Queen IRA sharpshooter. It's currently serving time for some old weapons charges. Who you're really looking for? A pro. Cause himself, The Jackal. I can identify him by his face. More importantly, by his methods. He'll likely be using four false identities.

Three will be on them and one in reserve at a dropbox somewhere. Enjoy your stay, Mr. Hazlitt. Thank you. I will. This is a remote fire station. You can send off 100 bullets before the first one ever hits the target. That is state of the art! Yeah! Run.

Contact Interpol and the French attach. The Chief of Service wants to know what's going on. No! He knows all your moves back to front. You think he's the one who's up against it? It's the way around. Bruce Willis, Richard Gear, Sydney Poitier. No!

The Jackal. Hello and welcome to Uncleared and Present Danger, the podcast about the political and military television of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans. I write a column for The Nation. I write the substack newsletter on Popular Front, and I'm the author of When the Clock Broke, Con Men Conspiracists and How America Cracked Up in the early 1990s, which is available in paperback, wherever books are sold. I kind of did that right that time. You did, yeah. More or less. People do comment on the fact. I know that I can never get through my own intro. They're like, yeah.

Yeah. Well, I forget the name of my book. Specifically, the title of your own book. Well, look, I got an expose. I didn't write, look, there was a, I'm, I don't want to, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus here. But let me just say, I didn't write, I wrote the title. I came up with the title of my book. The subtitle was the publisher. And we argued about it a little bit. And they, I didn't know.

I never published a book before. So I figured these guys must know what they're talking about. So I let them do it. And so that's why I don't remember it because it's actually not mine. And I have to, I don't remember what order it comes in. I know that there's copies of it all around my house. house, but it just never sticks in my head. So that's my excuse for that one. I don't have a book, so I have nothing to remember.

Don't allow them to just insist on your title. So you don't forget. I'm bad at coming up with title. I'd be like, yeah, call it every one. I don't care. All right. I'll come up with the title. You send me the manuscript. I'll write the title. All right. All right. I did, I did maybe give myself a book idea a couple days ago about a actually very important Jim Crow era politician, Carter Glass, who both cracked Jim Crow and Virginia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, so there's, there's one book, this has nothing to do with the movie, obviously. There's one recent.

It's also Glass Stegel, right? Yeah, Glass Stegel. So basically Carter Glass played a huge part, not just in Glass Stegel, but in the Bill, the Federal Reserve Act. he's like a major piece of the construction of like modern American financial regulation such that it is and he also was like the leading voice for segregation at Virginia's 1902 constitutional convention where it's where it wrote its Jim Crow Constitution he's interestingly he's just from Lynchburg which is like an hour for me he's like a central Virginia he was a journalist central

Virginia kind of like columnist in Lynchburg and also the vicious segregationist and also kind of a kind of a populist-esque crusader against the eastern financial establishment, which, you know, some of that was just straightforward bigotry, but yeah, anyway, there's one book about him from 2020 that is like mostly about his time in Washington because he gets to Washington as a member of the house in the early 1900s. So it's mostly about Carter Glass in Washington as this lawmaker. It's quite important lawmaker. It devotes one chapter to his Virginia years, which at that are like half of his life, right?

Half of his life is in Virginia as a Virginia newspaper man columnist Politico. So it's one chapter of that and like a paragraph to the Jim Crow Constitution. It's like totally uninterested in Carter Glass as a product of like basically the post-reconstruction South. Like Carter Glass, he, when he's in the 20s, as a newspaper man, he's railing against the biracial government that leads to Virginia. And interestingly, he denounces that biracial government for what he sees as its fiscal, it's fiscal. irresponsibility, right? And so right there, you're kind of seeing something interesting, which is a connection between his sort of vicious racism and belief in race hierarchy. Yeah. And then the progressivist died. Right. And the other interesting. That's very Woodrow Wilsony

too. Yeah. I mean, the other interesting wrinkle here is that I think in the present day, we think of Jim Crow as being this like purely almost like adivistic like suppression of peoples. But a lot of the advocates for Jim Crow, so two things are happening simultaneously, you have Jim Crow in the South and then also you have anti-immigrant suffrage restrictions in the North that are happening. And they're both being pursued by, you know, what we would recognize as like progressive, it's not like in the modern day sense, but in like the capital P social movement of the late

19th century, early 20th century since. And Jim Crow, from these progressives in the South, was thought to be like a rationalization of the racial order. You don't need mobs to keep people in control. You can just have laws and legal authorities. And I think there's a story to tell about this dynamic in the same way that, you know, when we had Bev Gage on talking about her Hoover book, like, Thinking of Hoover as like a conservative state builder, modernizer, this sort of like racist modernizer kind of dynamic that you can see in Wilson, you can see in glass, you can see in a bunch of these figures.

Yeah, that is really interesting. Yeah, I mean, Woodrow Wilson, I always, yeah, found that very confusing to be like, on the one hand, you know, a progressive and a liberal, but just so incredibly attached to. segregationism and racism and yeah i guess that the way to that shakes out is through kind of eugenicism and things like that which yeah a scientific or progressive spin on those things yeah uh anyway that's i just i think it's like it's okay yeah yeah that's a book and glasses archives are just at uva in any case like just kind of just down the street yeah just on the street um all right this is not a podcast about late early 20th century

American politics as interesting as I think they are. This is a podcast about movies and this week's movie is a little picture called The Jackal came out in 1997 directed by Michael Caten Jones who I don't know much about

well he directed Rob Roy which is kind of a good movie I or at least remember it being a good movie you know it's got Liam Neeson and Jessica Lang. It's about Scottish outlaw Highlander who gets in a dispute with an evil British nobleman. It's pretty cool. I remember being good. And he wrecked and he did City by the Sea, which I think I've tried to watch and didn't, wasn't that crazy about, but I like De Niro. And I've never seen bait. Oh wait, have I actually seen Basic Instinct 2? I have. I don't know why.

Basic instinct 2. I think I saw Basic Instinct 2 in theaters for some reason. I don't know why. it's real trash so oh and Memphis Bell of course have you seen Memphis Bell I've not seen Memphis Bell oh Memphis Bell was huge it was like or maybe it was just huge in my brain no it was not huge it was just broke even movie so it was about a B-17 bomber the crew of a B-17 bomber but I think that was big for me because I was so into World War II and bombers and stuff like that so I was into it I might see this this has Matthew Modine Eric Stoltz yeah I think I think I think you dig it. It's not great, but it's like, it's like pretty, pretty decent war movie.

It has guys I like, David Strait Third, John Lithgow. Yeah. Yeah, I thought this movie was like a giant smash, but I guess I just didn't, couldn't gauge that. Yeah, so this guy has, you know, career, has got some good movies. He seems like he's just, he's just a, like a working director, you know, just Hollywood Journeyman. Turning in the work. Yeah.

Um, his most recent film is Our Lady is in 2019. He's also, I mean, he seems to be Scottish. Lots of Scottish. Yeah, he plays a big part in, uh, in these films. Latest is a 2019 film called, uh, Our Ladies, uh, Scottish coming of age comedy drama, um, about some young women. So, okay. So the Jackal, directed by Michael, Kate and Jones starring a couple big stars in this film, uh, Bruce Willis as the as the jackal as our titular villain although we'll talk a little more about how

Willis may have been miscast started with Willis Richard Gear as the man chasing him Sidney Poitier as the FBI director also on the hunt in Diane Vanora who plays a Russian agent in the film, who is partner to Richard Gere's character. Richard Gere playing sort of an Irish terrorist locked up, partner to him and Sidney Poitier. Here's something of a plot synopsis. The Jackal opens with an international operation led by the FBI and Russian authorities that kills the younger brother of a Russian mobster and raids.

the mobster, Terrick Murad, vows revenge on the United States by hiring the enigmatic professional assassin known only as the Jackal. The Jackal is highly paid and utterly ruthless, and he begins an elaborate assassination plot aimed at what we think at first is killing the director of the FBI. FBI director Carter Preston, Sidney Poitier, and Russian major Valentina Koslova, Diane Vanora, discover the threat, but they realize they do not quite have the information and intelligence needed to anticipate the jackals' moves. The only lead they have comes from a past connection.

Declan Mulqueen, a former Irish Republican Army sniper, played by Richard Gear with an Irish accent, who is imprisoned in the U.S. and who at once had ties to people in the Jackals world. They take Mulqueen into custody, and he agrees to help them on. on the condition of his eventual freedom and the protection of his old love. And that kind of whole subplot gets dropped for the most part. It becomes just an excuse for a bunch of FBI agents to get killed, including, unfortunately, Koslova. So the film is following two separate tracks.

First is we are following the jackal as he prepares his assassination plot or following the jackal as he creates his weapons, establishes how he, he's going to get from point A to point B as he meticulously plans this attack. And then we're following Preston, Koslova and Low Queen as they chase the jackal and try to get to get him before it's too late. The chase takes the entire group, the entire group across Europe and across North America. They spent a bunch of time in Canada and Montreal, great place, love it, before it culminates in Washington, D.C., where the jackal sets up his assassination attempt. turns out he's not trying to kill the FBI director. He is trying to kill the First Lady of the United States. The Jack...

Hillary Clinton. I mean, basically it's going to be like a Hillary Clinton analog. Mulqueen, Mewishis is sharp shooting skills. And I need to say about this, I've had forgotten by the time this happens that he was a sniper. Like, it doesn't come up at all in the film. And so I'm like, how does this guy know how to shoot so well? It's like, oh, yeah, I was reading, rereading the plot summary. I was like, oh, yeah, he's a sniper thing that the movie does not really play with.

Anyway, Mo Queen uses his sniper skills to stop the attack, destroying the kind of a gun platform that Jackal had built for the purposes. And what follows in is a chase for Mo Queen and the Jackal dukelet out and the Jackal is killed. Preston arranges from Mocqueen's freedom and Mocqueen gets out of there having saved the day and protected the life of the woman who was part of his past the Jackal also stars

or the cast rather also includes Matilda May as Isabella Celia Zoncona J.K. Simmons Jack Black and who else you might he may recognize

Daniel Day Kim has a minor role and Larry King plays himself in the film The Jackal is loosely based off of Kenneth Ross's novel The Day of the Jackal which the film we covered on the Patreon some time ago

there's apparently also a mini series new miniseries based off the Day of the Jackal that is it's supposed to be pretty decent actually and I might check that out but this is like a loose adaptation of Day of the Jackal and that's very apparent and we can talk about the major differences between the two. Sorry, I got something wrong. The Day of the Jackal written by Frederick Forsythe, the screenplay for the film, 1973 film is by Kenneth Ross. Apparently Forsyth disliked this

97 movie so much that he took his, he didn't want his name attached to it. So the credit is to Ross for the screenplay, but not to Forsyth for the story idea. I want to clear that out. The Jackal was a modest success. Actually, it's actually pretty big success. Yeah. Made $159 million off of a $60 million budget, which I think actually makes a lot of sense.

It got big stars. It's like an adult thriller. Like, yeah, this seems like it would do well in the market of the late 90s. Although it did receive mostly negative reviews from critics, which we'll talk about because the movie is bad. Yeah, that sucks. The Jackal was released on November 14th, 1970. This is a Thanksgiving movie.

I'll be honest, John, if a movie like this, as bad as this came out over Thanksgiving weekend, I'd probably go see it. Probably. I mean, you didn't know it was bad before you saw it. Yeah, but I'd read the newspaper. You read the newspaper. But the thing is, right, like it's Thanksgiving weekend. You don't want to be your own family anymore.

you go see a movie doesn't need to be that great yeah you got to take a little break yeah you just get out of there so so we're going to just blame this movie success or attribute this movie success to thanksgiving so yeah to the to the holiday to the holiday um all right movie came out november 14th 1927 so let's check up in new york times for that day all right well we got a photo here of oren hatch and patrick leahy who look old even patrick lehy was in the not, didn't retire from the Senate that long ago, right? He was already... Is he potentially still living?

Yeah, I think so. Didn't he retire from the Senate in like 2020 or something like that? Uh, uh, 20203. 2023, even sooner. I was, and, and, yeah, he doesn't look young here. And this is 1997. He's 85 now. Wow.

He's, so he was only, he was, this was 30 years ago. Yeah. Okay. He was old for a long time. That's a true American senator. He's got a Robert Duvall syndrome. He never looked young. Right, right, right.

Orrin Hatch, not a name I think of often anymore, but was such a huge deal in his day. Return of partisanship to Capitol Hill. As the 105th Congress ended its first session tonight, it could boast of one paramount bipartisan achievement, the midsummer legislation to balance the budget and cut taxes. But the ill will, stalemate, and destruction. of the session's closing weeks point to return to sharp partisan

partisanship next year it's almost if the session were cut in two after weeks of working together sometimes uncomfortably the outer wings of each party got fed up with cooperation all right well i just got to say you haven't seen nothing yet uh compared to the the 1990s looks i mean i guess the partisanship in terms of governing made things very difficult and was bad and people kind of were dismayed by it. But I think in terms of tone and rhetoric, especially right now, kind of hadn't seen nothing.

The degree of partisanship is much higher. I mean, we have both parties, I mean, you know where I stand on this, but you have both parties basically just accusing each other of being a conspiracy against the country at this point, which is quite a bit. I mean, the rhetoric got heated at this time, but that's quite a bit stronger than it was then.

So it's funny to read these old papers and then be like, wow, these things have changed quite a bit. Iraq carries out threat to expel U.S. inspectors, Clinton playing down on immediate attack. Iraq carried out its threat to expel American weapons inspectors today, rebuffing every diplomatic attempt to resolve the impasse, and propelling the Clinton administration closer to a military response. President Clinton denounced Iraq's action, but he stopped short once again of ordering military retaliation. despite repeated warnings not to defy the United Nations. In fact, after days of rumblings, the administration played down the possibility of immediate response. This reminds us that our relationship with Saddam Hussein, if you want to call it that, from the Gulf War up until the war in Iraq was extremely tense, and there was several times,

I think, not several, but maybe a few times the United States resorted to airstrikes having to do with either violations of the no-fly zone or nuclear weapons inspection issues. And the reason why the Bush administration was able to kind of launder its war was because of a number of UN resolutions that Iraq was in violation of. And Iraq, there's a lot of interesting scholarship beginning to come out now. I didn't read that book, The Achilles Trap, but it looked very interesting about the misunderstanding, basically, that Iraq had of the United States intentions and vice versa that may have led to the war. I think there was obviously also people who just wanted this war, that war. So, Clinton deprives, Congress deprives Clinton of money for UN and

IMF, abortion link at issue. Again, you know, these days this seems very quaint when we have entire federal agencies rolled up. New studies offer hope and caution on AIDS therapies, testing drug missions. Well, this is an area where things have improved. Now, HIV medications are extremely good, and basically, you can live a normal and healthy life if you're on a drug regime and sometimes get to the point where there's barely or undetectable levels of virus in your system. So we kind of conquered AIDS, which is a pretty incredible.

incredible achievement because it was terrifying in the 90s. I mean, I was just reading about a something, some new HIV treatment. It's a $40 HIV shot that, let's see, a drug that provides near perfect protection against HIV with shots just twice a year will be made available at $40 per patient annually. and low in middle-income countries offering new hope for ending the HIV epidemic. Yeah, that's incredible. That's it. That's like that should do it.

I mean, unless someone cuts the budget for all those things and makes it impossible to distribute that, why would they want to do something like that? Right. Why would the genocidal white nationalist who took control the government for two months? Hey, Jamel, you can't talk that way because you're going to be inciting political violence.

That's true. If I describe someone's views as what they are, that, in fact, is inciting political violence. That's inciting political violence. I want to apologize to Elon Musk for calling him a genocidal white nationalist. Yeah. Thank you. We can allow you back on the air now. Oh, great.

Great. Wonderful. New rules at U.S. borders provoke criticism. Again, looks very quaint. Early one morning in August, Neil G. Shearer, a Canadian yachtsman bound for a Pacific sailing incursion, gotten his car at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, and headed for Seattle, Tacoma Airport as he had, this is, I understand now why people who read the, read the news get this like weird sing-songy inflection, because it's just like, it kind of naturally happens.

You start to zone out and do it. Headed for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, as he had done many times before. He did not make it across the border. American immigration agents in Washington State turned him back and barred Mr. Scher from entering the United States for five years. Similarly, Valia Hernandez,

Dosherwood, left her home in Guadalajara, Mexico one day to visit her husband in Houston. While there, she was to have surgery to repair a hernia that had developed two months later when she gave birth in Houston, Texas to her son, Christian. But the El Paso border check point, she and Christian, were turned away by American agents and prohibited from trying to enter the United States again for five years. Well, again, this looks quaint compared to what's going on now, where they just throw people in dungeons, basically,

or deport them to countries they had nothing to do with. But, you know, maybe you could see the origins of such policies. I mean, what's interesting, these anecdotes are, I think, are useful because what they, in one case, you have just a guy, you know, crossing the border to take a flight to, you know, it seems like you probably has like plenty of relationships, business relationships, personal relationships in the U.S., and it's just crossing back and forth. Then you have a woman who's husband lives, she's in Mexico, her husband lives in Texas. Mexico, Texas, of course, having been once part of Mexico, and she too is he's just crossing the border to do her, take care of her personal affairs. And I think what I like about those two anecdotes is that they emphasize something that I think has been lost in our current political discussion, which is that borders really are artificial and like do not actually capture how people, And people and peoples move and live their lives, right? Like the freedom to move across a border, which I think is like ought to be considered

fundamental reflects the fact that people's lives aren't actually like borders do not constitute some hard barrier for people's lives. You know what I'm saying? It's I'll put it this way. No one thinks about, I live in Virginia, you live in New York, but I don't think about crossing a border, right? When I go take a train to New York. I don't think about crossing a border when I take a trip to West Virginia or to, or, you know, when I was, I grew up in Virginia Beach or something, North Carolina border. And I have friends who live in North Carolina, right?

Like, it's just, it's artificial. It's not really there. And, you know, it's my view that, like, as much as possible, we should, like, institutionalize the idea. like these things aren't really there and there's like administrative reasons and you know there are some reasons to sort of treat them as real for practical things but like treating them as real for like like as ontologically real as sort of like in the president's words if you don't have a border you don't have a country yeah i think that that's stupid yeah yeah i mean i'm not going to argue with you about that i think that like obviously there's there's there's you know people just

moving back and forth for regular commerce across the border is not is not like hurting the national interest and like that's exactly the kind of thing you kind of want to encourage or allow because it's going to just make you um you know your country more wealthy um obviously you don't want you don't want like you know the jackal moving back and forth between your borders but no not the jackal but the jackal has ways of moving around undetected um anything else in the paper i think we almost read every single headline. I think so. So let's just jump into the movie. All right.

Yeah. I don't think you've seen this before, have you? No, I haven't seen this before. This is the first time I've seen this movie, but I remember, like, I remember, you know, like, when you're in, you're in school and kids, like, come to school and they, like, talk about a movie that they saw, and they were, like, describing the shit and, like, the cool stuff in it, like, the gun and stuff. I remember kids like talking about the jackal and being like it was cool and I don't think I was like envious of not seeing it but I was like okay cool um but no I hadn't seen it I knew it existed because of that but I hadn't thought of it for many years and I thought it was going to be a lot better than it was based on the cast I guess well I don't know about Richard gear um and just the era I was like hey you know they could they could put well Sydney Poitia is great obviously um you know

they could usually put together a pretty decent action movie or thriller at that time, but this is like one of the, I don't know if it's, we've watched some real bad movies, but like this one is so, okay, it is a little fun because it's just every cliche of 90s movies under the sun. Like, it begins with an FBI Russian cooperation in Moscow against, like, a, like, a Caucasian gangster. And, like, that just felt, like, that whole nightclub scene felt super cliched. The fact that the guy, that Richard Gears person is, like, an ex-IRA sniper, like, we've, we've seen so many IRA movies. like and then it just felt like a ton of different like they did a grab bag of like previous action movies that we watched from the 90s and then like nothing quite makes sense like why does I just couldn't like understand the relationship between the the hitman and like the IRA guy and why they were you know like it just didn't seem believable to me it was a lot of excuse to show

off gear in the movie which I don't always mind like he builds this like 20 millimeter cannon that's like controlled by a computer to shoot up the stage where the vice press it's just I don't it's not like I don't understand why he uses this as an assassination weapon it's very impractical yeah besides like looking cool and he's like I got he has like depleted uranium ammunition but why does he need depleted uranium ammunition he's shooting people in open air. It doesn't make any sense. He makes this loud weapon that's not that accurate and to just like draw attention to himself or where the gun is, which he remotely controls. And then like this is supposed to be like, I guess maybe it's supposed to like send

a message because they're trying to do this, this spectacular assassination. The motivation doesn't make sense. They're just like, oh, this fucking, uh, this fucking, uh, this gangster is so evil that like because his brother died he's going to revenge he's going to try to get revenge on the first lady of the United States for 70 million dollars come on dude come on like this just like there's not a single believable thing in the in the movie especially starting from scene one like they go to confront the dude like the the gangster's brother in the Moscow nightclub and somehow they were like they just like go and like talk to him you know they like get in his face and then there's like a like standoff in which like you know he tries to stab somebody like

it just didn't I was like why are you not arresting him like why are you like having this like talk with him where he's like yelling at you and then he lunges at you you have the you have like big cops there you could just put him in handcuffs like right from from from from jump there's just like not a damn thing in the movie that makes sense and I guess there's just like yeah it was just a bag of cliches it wasn't that interested i didn't find rich gears irish accent that convincing and like yeah it's just and i don't know i have a high tolerance for things getting pretty silly in this genre but this is really one of the silliest and like i didn't i know you thought willis's character was like at least

entertaining to watch because he was like an evil like evil in a fun way i just didn't i didn't I didn't get into either gears or Willis's character that much or any character, except for Sidney and he's just playing a role that he played in like sneakers, kind of. I mean, he's just, he's just Sidney-Portier. Speaking of, speaking of plet,

he's just sort of playing, he's like stern black authority figure. Yeah, which is just sort of like is a trope. We've talked about this before, the trope of this genre. So I've never seen this movie before. And like you,

I kind of just assumed that I, probably find it at least a little entertaining because it's like, oh, assassins, it's based off the day of the jackal, whatever. But it's, it's, it's bad. It's, it's extremely cliche. Bruce Willis, I'll talk, talk about him for a bit. Oh, Richard Gear, I just don't think is very good. Like, I just don't think, I have flat out sucks as an actor. I do not like him. No, I don't I do not understand what attracts people to rich your gear. Yeah, other than the fact, he's very handsome, but otherwise I just don't think there's a single movie I've seen him in that I've really enjoyed that much, to be honest with you.

Not, I mean, there's American Gigolo. Never seen it. Oh, no, I have seen it. I have seen it. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. But he's like, that was him.

He should have ended his career then. Like he was, he is American jingle-o. Bruce Willis is interesting in this movie because he's at once sleepwalking through it. But also, unlike everyone else in the film, he's like, he's in a little costume. He's dyeing his hair. Oh, yeah, he's doing like the saint with all the, with all the, with all the disguises. Another movie they just dumped into it. There's an extent to which I feel like he's actually probably having a good time because it's like he has a lot to do.

with the character and that's just like dress up and and do this and do this preparation I guess but beyond that he's not like a particularly compelling character and because he's just a mercenary where he has no particular reason nor to kill the first lady

when it when the movie has to like basically come up with some way to make sure that he stays on mission like so the movie script-wise, is just kind of a basic problem. For the cops to get to the jackal, who is enigmatic and mysterious, they have to follow leads,

which means the jackal slowly has to be found, right? Like he has to, and he has to lose the element of surprise. But if the jackal loses the element of surprise, he tells us, when he takes us, when he takes, the contract that he's going to quit he won't do it and so the movie then has to figure out a way to have the jackal continue to want to do the do the assassination despite the fact that like he's this a better chance never that is going to get caught and it's a movie just cannot figure this out and so like by the end when he when he when he's about to try to shoot the first lady and uh the thing fails it's sort of like he's like he's like panic to

about it, but it's like, why? Like, you don't give a shit. Let's just, just, just leave. Just go away. Um, the other thing I'll say is that one of the problems with, with the movie is Richard Gear is our protagonist and basically our hero. And Willis is our antagonist or basically our villain. But Willis is so much more personable on screen than Gear is. And Willis is so likable on screen. Like, I mean, remember, Willis has made his, made his, made his, um, made his bones as a comedic actor. And he has, he has a ton of just like screen charisma.

And so in the film, whenever you get to the Richard Gear parts, it's a little bit like, this is kind of, this is kind of boring. I don't really care for this guy. And then you get to the Willis parts, you know, well, give me more Bruce Willis. I want to see more Bruce Willis like doing his thing hanging out. and the effect of it is to for me at least is to sort of like gradually just sympathize at Willis like there's a scene where Jack Black plays

one of the people responsible for curing the weapons Oh you mean you like it when he tortures when he tortures Jack Black Yeah when he like blows Jack Black's legs off And he's just sort of like it's kind of fun Jesus dude he's like totally sadistic Like yeah he like he tests out the gun on the guy who like built the automatic platformer which is Jack Black who's like this annoying like nerd who's like yeah this is so cool um and then he like blows him away with the 20 millimeter can which which

he bought like on an online online arms dealer automated arms dealing website or something like that yeah and gets it shipped in a container to Montreal um I mean one thing I'll say about the movie to its credit is you know we're dealing with larger budgets it's the late 90s those are practical effects they're blowing up actual cars they got real like like an action you know they're using an actual dummy with some good uh blood and guts effects for you know the exploding jack black uh it works it looks good the movie looks good like it's not it doesn't look like crap or anything it's just it's not particularly well put together um okay politics i don't is there is there there there's not really any politics in this movie

I can make something up. Go ahead. But the film does, I mean, we've talked about this before, you know, if part of the story of this genre of film through the 90s is kind of like a search for enemies, like who is the next threat to America, then this is when we're beginning to see terrorism kind of show up as the kind of threat. But again, as we, I think as we pointed out in previous films, the model for ideological terrorism in these movies remains like national conflicts right like so we get these IRA movies

with the villains are you know IRA terrorists or or in Air Force one Russian separatists otherwise the terrorists are just like totally nihilistic right just doing it for the sake of doing it or in this case mercenaries the kind of ideologically driven but not now National conflict-driven terrorism of the post-N-11 era in American movies hasn't quite made its way into Hollywood yet. We're not quite there yet. So this makes it, I think, a bit of an interesting artifact in terms of sort of like the Hollywood conception of terrorism or the Hollywood conception of this kind of political

violence, which is mainly just like, yeah, you would do this for hire. to accomplish some petty personal goal, basically. But there's no other rationale here. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's like, I guess one thing you could say is this movie has, with all of its cliches, is like undigested Cold War elements, like leftovers of the Cold War. Like you've got the trope of FBI, or U.S. Russian cooperation, which we've seen in a lot of movies because that was like the hope in the 90s that we were friends now and that quickly

turned to be out not to be true um and then you have like yeah like uh international criminals and then you have like militants from conflicts that were kind of over like etta militant like his ex girl lover whatever the lady isabella zancona i mean Richard gears uh lost lover. She's like an eta militant who work with the IRA. And it's kind of like, I don't know, it's kind of like, um, you know, offers like a rehabilitation narrative or a redemption narrative for like these old militants and be like this guy's in prison, but we're going to find a use for it. We're going to put him back to work. He's the only, the only, also it's just so silly. Like this IRA guy is like the only guy that can help them in this. And like that scene where it's like,

he's like they're like about to walk away from him and then he's like I met him one time and they all like stop and then like that was like the that was the deciding reason they're like oh he met him that means he definitely like is going to be able to help us with this case um yeah so there's just a lot of like combinations of like there's nothing deliberately uh ideological everything is kind of personal relationships, it's about revenge, it's about, you know, evening scores. So yeah, there's no ideology in the film, and that's why everything kind of is a mess and there's no reason for doing anything. And, yeah, it's just a world before things kind of reorganized around geopolitical or ideological axes.

So the movie is a mess and a bunch of different tropes and remnants of previous conflicts. It's sort of like, yeah, again, kind of a smear of a lot of the things we've seen in the movies that we cover. But even less focused. It's sort of like we're getting farther and farther from the Cold War. It's like 1997 sometimes I say is like peak end of history. and like this movie basically having no anchor whatsoever in any kind of legible political stakes other than like cool shit happening and like gangsters and previous militants like doing things

for revenge personal revenge against each other it's like all right we're like nothing's making sense anymore um so i think that that's kind of like you know basically where you could politically situate this movie. This kind of hope for a U.S. Russian cooperation. Like, I think the Russians kind of held on, like, once a war on terror started, they're like, oh, you know, we have our own war on terror. Like, we'll cooperate with each other. And the U.S. sort of wasn't into it because, you know, Russia had already started to get a little bit aggressive with its neighbors, and also Putin was doing an authoritarian consolidation, which we know nothing about in this country.

Yeah, so this movie is kind of a mess in a lot of ways. It's a lot of, like, a lot of, like, it's very flashy, but it's a lot of explosions that go nowhere. I would say the best part of the movie is the gun that he builds. like it's just cool and then everything it is pretty cool he built and it's not practical but it doesn't matter and I think that's like what the kids in my

kids in my like middle school talking about they're like oh he goes this awesome gun so yeah I think it's it's a pretty it's it's not it's not one that stands the test of time and I recently rewatch for like the 50th time

because Robert Redford died in sneakers and I was like wow this movie still holds up it's undefeatable and like it's so funny to see a movie from five years later that is much more dated than one from that which the technology in the movie is obviously really antiquated now but the movie itself just like stands up in a really solid way I think it just comes down to writing and and having a really fun and propulsive plot which this movie has a meandering and nonsensical plot. Right, right. With like idiotic conceits. Yeah. One thing I want to point out about this movie is it's terrible gender politics. Oh, good point.

So two things stand out. The first is that we have a major character. This is Russian colonel. What's her character's name again? I just being pulled up. No, not Zancona. Not Zancona. It's Kozlova.

Cozlova. And kind of the whole conceit of her character, she's, she, she appears, initially appears to be kind of interesting, but like they kind of shunned her to the side. And the major revelation you get about her is that she's so dedicated to her job that she's never been able to find a man or, or build a family. And she also has a scarring on her face. And so that's rendered her, you know, unlovable and that she's too dedicated to her job. and of the of the three the the the trio who are our heroes she's the one who gets killed she has to kill in confrontation with the jackal um she shot interestingly enough in the gut in the womb um uh and when she dies in the movie it's sure the i think the strong implication is that yes she had feelings for richard gear's character uh and so she she she's She's killed. And then there's another character, a gay man who's a minor character who the

jackal seduces to get closer to the first lady to do his plans. And he's just unceremoniously murdered by the jackal. And it's just like it's interesting to me in a bad way, in a negative way, that you have these two characters, these two non-traditional characters in terms of their gender performance. who are just like dispatched with who aren't allowed any real resolution and who you know the gay character especially he's like he he helps he's essentially responsible

for the fact that the Jack gets as close as he does to being able to succeed and it's just like it's really striking it's striking I mean one or the other would be bad but together it's sort of like yeah these are these are cliches where these are cliches, these are tropes. But they're deployed uncritically. And they suck.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like the gay stuff in the movie was controversial because apparently, well, first of all, I think what we have to remind people is like, I think also mentioned in middle school was the fact that there was a scene in a gay bar in, and like there was a gay, like he pretends to be gay as one of his characters. Like in 1997, that was different than that. the way it would be now. Like, that was more, like, more, you know,

playing on actual, like, prejudices and purient things that the audience might think about gay people. And apparently, in an early, this is horrible, an early test screen version of the film, um, the, the audience loudly cheered the killing of a gay person in the film, which is horrible.

And then, but there was going to be a scene re-edited, but Bruce Willis successfully, fought to keep a same sex same sex kiss in the film i don't know if that's like bruce willis being like woke or like him being fucked up you know what i mean it was like no like don't try to censor me yeah yeah i think willis conceives of himself as a real actor yeah right and i think he is he is he's he's given some really great performances and i think that's what that is he's got i have a quote from the advocate, the LGBT magazine from 1997, and it says, I just didn't feel that it should

be eliminated from the film because they're afraid of offending a certain segment of the audience. I think that is more offensive. I don't know what he's trying to say there. In any case, yeah, he wanted, he just wanted to like stick with the, with the artistic, the artistic integrity of this movie, which is, which is dubious to begin with. But I can understand that. Um, Yeah. So that was, yeah, those kinds of scenes and characters and figures would have, would have read differently to an audience in 1997 than they do today. Like today it's like that would be not a big deal in a film. Yeah. Although I don't know. I mean, I think, I don't know. I don't know about that. Yeah. You think I think I think Hollywood is still maybe, especially in what's

supposed to be a big mass market film. I think Hollywood probably still a little hesitant to show like same sex intimacy among between. men. Maybe. Maybe you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Or they would have to show it. They couldn't show it. They, they, they, they couldn't show it. They both, the reason why they can't do it is because they would have to, like, you know, they do it in like a naughty childish way in this movie being like, gay people. And like, they don't do it. They couldn't, they would have to do it in a like, there's totally nothing wrong with this way. And then other people get upset about that. Like, they can't do either. They can't be like, we're going to present this in a. slightly homophobic way or be like you know what we're just going to present this like anybody else's lifestyle like this person just happens to be gay we don't we're not saying we're not making a statement with that and then conservatives would get mad that it was promoting LGBT stuff so they're in a they're in a catch 22 there yeah yeah uh all right do you have anything else to add about this movie no no yeah i don't either i mean it's it's it's not there's just not

that much there. It's a very poor adaptation of the Day of the Jack Hole, which is a good novel and a great film. The 73 film is terrific. Talk about a film that is so compelling to watch in part because it really does dial in and focus on the preparation. And it's such a, it's more or less sort of like competent experts do their jobs movie, except the competent experts are like a police detective and an assassin. And it's, it's, it's, It's a lot, I think it's one of the great movies of the 70s. So I would, I would recommend watching the day of the jackal and this attempt at an adaptation, this sort of attempt to do like a techno day of the jackal, right down to the soundtrack choice.

I don't know if you paid any attention to that. But like the needle drops were like massive attack and tricky, right, trip hop. I love that shit. Which I love that stuff. I love that music. A movie that you hate, the saint also has an amazing soundtrack. Yes. I don't understand why you think that movie is that bad compared to some of the stuff you like.

I'm just putting it out there. I'm just putting it out there. I know it's a little silly, but that's absolutely fair. I have no answer for that. Okay. Yeah, I don't think you need to watch this movie unless you are completionist with our show. Yeah, you can totally skip this one. No need to watch it.

not even if you're a willis completionist and if you're a gear completionist I have no idea what's wrong with you yeah you're a sick person all right that is our show thank you as always for listening you can reach us via our feedback email unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com for this week in feedback we've an email from jesse as always we are you can find our podcast forever podcast are found that's, you know, Spotify, Google, Apple Podcasts, and you should leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you can leave us a rating because it helps people find the show.

Now, back to feedback. For this weekend feedback, we have an email from Jesse. Jesse writes an email titled Starship Troopers, Helldivers 2, and Charlie Kirk. Hello, I just finished your episode on Starship Troopers, and I was wondering how or if your discussion would have been different if you had recorded a short time later, specifically after the murder of Charlie Kirk. There are two parallels here, I think. The conservative reaction to the event,

specifically the use of it as propaganda, especially before the killer's identity was known to further their fascist agenda. The intense reaction to immediately blame their favorite enemies, trans people, liberals, and defa, et cetera, in order to move towards an ever-increasing fascist holding American politics

and society was scary. It put me in the mind of the asteroid hitting Buenos Aires. Was it an accident from their own side or was it really the enemy? Does it even matter for their purposes? The second is less fully thought out or even on target, but the apparent Hell Divers 2 memes potentially written on the bullet casings, the immediate recognition by the Hell Divers 2 online community is immediately drew my attention. I have a teenage son who loves that game, and we were recently discussing the parallels between it and search of troopers, which it is apparently based on.

His take on both was the satire of the humans being clearly the bad guys, murdering and exterminating an entire alien race for facts. fascistic colonialist reasons. So how do we arrive at the idea that a right-winger murders another right-wing fascist for not being fascist enough using clear satire aimed against fascism? Well, the answer here is that the kid wasn't the right-winger. I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on both, but especially number one. How does this movie hit after seeing the recent reaction by the right to the killing of one of their own?

Thanks for the podcast. I look forward to it every time. It is a fascinating lens to look at look through both at history and today. Keep up the fantastic work. Thank you, Jesse, for the email. I should say, before we even get the answering this, that if you want to hear a discussion of Charlie Kirk, you can subscribe to our Patreon where we have a whole separate side show,

political talk, unclear and present politics. The Patreon also has our episodes on the Cold War, films of the Cold War. And you can find both at patreon.com slash unclear pod, and it's $5 a month to get access to this additional material. Well, you know, I think we covered how some of the aesthetics in the movie looked a lot like both, you know, post-9-11 conservative stuff and definitely how it was kind of MAGA. It looked a lot like the kind of fascist, America and fascist aesthetics MAG is doing it. Obviously, like the Charlie Kirk funeral looks very much out of like the Starship Troopers cinematic universe, I guess. I mean, if I follow correctly, was the letter writer under the misconception that this guy was a right winger?

Yeah, I think I think this letter was written. It was like written before we really got a sense. All the stuff came out. Yeah. So the kid wasn't a right winger. I mean, we should have discussed before the show, but the kid, it's hard to say that the kid was ideological at all. I mean, he got his ideology through video games. Right.

Right. And so, like, I don't know, to be fair-minded, if he was, if he was watching, if he was playing some games that had like manifestly right-wing content and he wrote right-wing messages on the bullets, I would start screaming bloody murder about fascist America. So I understand what they're doing. I just don't have the power of the state behind me. So, okay, let's be, let's fair is fair. Like, you know, I would say, one could say he had broadly speaking left-wing reasons, although, he wasn't part of any kind of political organizations, he was upset for his personal reasons and for what he felt were political, and the messages he put were political messages. With that being said, you know, like it's pretty clear that, as I've argued, you know, elsewhere that, like, in the United States, there are lots of different forms of media that are easy to access and lots of different forums and ideas that are easy of all kinds on the political spectrum and it's not hard to get guns and then you know basically you're going to occasionally have people who commit violence and then and then you know political political actors

attempt for their ends to to create narratives around them and um you know with with varying degrees of credibility and uh and um you know in the 90s um there was efforts I think They're more justified to connect the GOP to Timothy McVeigh, say, right? To try to kind of like, what is, there's a word for it. It's not bad jacketing, but it's like, it's trying to tie your opponents to their most extreme, you know, side of their. And like, and the right is now doing this in a much more, much more virulent and dangerous way by being like, oh, this is, there's a left wing extremism epidemic. there's you know we have to crack down on dissent etc etc i don't know how much the public is kind of like buying that a narrative i think some people are and some people aren't and it's going to change over

time um so yeah i i don't know i mean my thoughts on the on political violence in the united states um are that it happens because we're a vast country with extremely polarized politics and a lot of guns and no one's hands are entirely clean and it's very difficult to get these kind of badly socialized people who feel in despair about their life to convince them that this is not the right way to do political action and you know they feel desperate and they do stupid and horrible things and they might not be terribly bright they might not have a very clear idea that what they could do, I mean, today, just now we had a shooter who, you know, seems to have killed detainees in what they're saying was an attack on ICE officers. Now, you couldn't,

you couldn't script it any better that this person is hurting the very cause of the people that he's trying to defend. You know, these people are not rational political actors who are viewing the entire political field as a totality that they need to think about each move. Not to say that you always have to like pund it every move, but I would say it's pretty clear that that committing violence is not generally, I mean, there's exceptions to this, is not generally going to do your cause any good. Although, in my opinion, the types of people who did Oklahoma City are now in charge of the federal government, but whatever. So who knows? We are kind of led by a cabal of Timothy McBez. Yeah, exactly. So, so I don't know. It's, it's a terrible time to be, to be an American citizen. And it sort of, it sort of makes you sad every single day to see these things happen and then see the lies that are told about them. And the denial and the fact that we just don't have a source of authority that could come and say, you know, let's, let's try to cool down the temperatures in the country. The rhetoric is very, is very, is very,

charged. And I think as you were saying on a recent podcast, a recent YouTube, you're just like, yeah, I don't really seen a president who's like adding gasoline to the fire. Usually they'll do something to be like, let's take it easy. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Jesse, so much for the email. We really appreciate it. And as always, to everyone else, you can reach out to us at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. And that works for both feedback for this podcast. and also for the Patreon podcast. Episodes come out roughly every two weeks, and so we are going to have our next episode on a movie I really enjoy.

It is the second Pierce Brosnan Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, where the villain is basically an even more deranged Rupert Murdoch. So here's a quick plot synopsis, a media mogul of staging international incidents to pit the world's superpowers against each other. Now, James Bond must take on this, evil mastermind in an adrenaline charge battle to end this reign of terror and prevent

global pandemonium. I like this one. I think I even might like it more than Golden Eye, even though I don't think it's a better movie than Golden Eye. I just like it more. Jonathan Price plays the villain and it has Michelle Yo as well. So these are just actors I like a lot.

So our next film is Tomorrow Never Dies. And over at the Patreon, we should have an episode up on the first mobile suit Gundam compilation film and our next Patreon episode after that will be I want to say on the thing from another world

in honor of spooky season is it the mobile suit thing up? Yeah, mobile suit one's up. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. No, people like it too. People in fact, they're like amused by the fact that I'm a big nerd about that stuff and also amused by the fact that you hate it. So let's keep doing that. That seems like a good gimmick. Yeah, it is a good gimmick. Although, of course, immediately, a bunch of comments have been like, you got to get John to watch more anime. No, there's, there's torture. I don't want to do it.

I don't want to do it. I'll watch it. I'll watch like Princess Moored Okay, but that doesn't fit at all with our show. There's what, okay, there's one film that you might like. Can we do the, the weird, can we do the weird, um, Miyazaki movie where it's like sentimental about like the zero airplane? the wind rises we can do the wind rises what was it what was the one that you were going to suggest it's called pat labor two or pat labor two I'm never sure you pronounce that

it's another mecca anime but it's the animation it's more recent the animation looks great and it's all about like labor and like you know international conflict and stuff so just just consider it um okay not for a while okay

those are a nice Patreon episodes and that's your next main feed episode thank you as always for listening to the pod for john gans i'm dimal buoy and we'll see you next time You know,