“The Day of the Jackal” is a known quantity in Hollywood thanks to the 1973 movie of the same name, which is also considered one of the best cop movies of all time. Directed by Fred Zinnemann and based on the novel by Frederick Forsyth, that movie centered around an assassin called the Jackal (Edward Fox) who is hired by the terrorist organization OAS to kill Charles de Gaulle. There are echoes of the 1973 movie in Peacock’s modern day “The Day of the Jackal” TV show, including the names the assassin uses and a redo of a scene involving a gun and a melon. But otherwise, the stories are quite different.

The series “The Day of the Jackal” starts, appropriately enough, with a murder. While initially it looks like the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne) is going after the head of a company, he only shoots the man in the leg. This is because the person the Jackal was really paid to kill is this man’s father, a high-powered political candidate. The Jackal gets him when he goes to the hospital to see his son. In fact, the Jackal hits him in the head from over 3,000 meters away. For those who don’t know, that is a very good shot. A shot so good, it’s almost inhuman.

This gets him his next job: killing the billionaire Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla), an idealist who is releasing a program called River in which anyone can find out where anyone’s finances come from. There are some higher-ups who aren’t happy with this development and want River to be shut down; killing UDC, as he prefers to be called, is sure to do it. But the Jackal has to get to him first, and there are many difficulties to doing that. Not least of which is MI6, Britain’s answer to the Central Intelligence Agency, and specifically, a particularly dogged agent named Bianca (Lashana Lynch). However, Bianca is dealing with her own difficulties, not the least of which includes her husband and daughter, who don’t appreciate the way work occupies all her time. To reveal more would be to go against the spoilers that Peacock has in place, but needless to say, the cat and mouse game between the Jackal and Bianca is just getting warmed up.

It’s not much of a cat and mouse game, however. Bianca spends more time trying to find the Jackal’s gunsmith Norman (Richard Dormer) than trying to find the Jackal himself, even if she’s trying to use Norman as a stepping stone. And for his part, the Jackal has to evade Bianca and her colleagues, but it never seems like too big a lift for him. If anything, he has more problems from a woman named Nuria (Úrsula Corberó). Peacock requests that we don’t let slip who she is but suffice it to say that she makes more of a difference in his life than Bianca ever does.

In fact, outside of Nuria, the Jackal’s story is relatively straightforward. While he dons bespoke disguises and hides in places for inordinate portions of time to avoid detection, his goals are pretty much what you’d expect them to be: killing his next target. That’s why it’s strange that Eddie Redmayne’s performance is so uneven. One minute he’s behaving as if nothing affects him and the next he’s crying helplessly over something that shouldn’t impact him that much. It seems that Redmayne’s desire to emote clashes with the character’s lack of feeling, therefore we never really get a handle on his Jackal. Is he a sociopath who just pretends to care about certain people? Or is he a fully feeling man who just has an unusual job? Redmayne’s performance is too contradictory to hold together. This is partially what makes this series less than the sum of its parts.

Lashana Lynch, on the other hand, is fantastic. Part of this is because she has a lot of people to work off of. While the Jackal works alone, and therefore only interacts with, at most, one person at a time, Bianca has her family, her work colleagues, and suspects in the case to react to. Lynch is great at responding to them all, whether they’re her bosses at work — played by Chukwudi Iwuji and Lia Williams, who are both far shadier than they initially let on — or her husband and daughter (Sule Rimi and Florisa Kamara), who challenge her convictions.

However, while Lashana Lynch is great as Bianca, she and the whole production is ultimately brought down by a series that’s too long and too stupid to work. Though the first couple episodes are thrilling, “The Day of the Jackal” quickly sags in the middle. This 10-episode series could have been six or eight episodes if it had just cut out the fat. That fat includes the Jackal’s relationship with Nuria and her relatives. Again, no spoilers here, but the storyline adds little to the tale, and Nuria seems just as wishy-washy as the Jackal is. Also, there are plot holes in the story that never get resolved, but it’s not like there’s no time to do so.

After a while, I found I got the most caught up in the Jackal’s attempts to murder his targets. I got disappointed when he didn’t kill them and momentarily elated when he did. This was appalling to me, because I don’t like to root for the deaths of people, even if they’re fictional. But these scenes are so well put together — and put you so firmly on the side of the Jackal — that it’s hard not to be oddly intrigued by them, even as you’re put off by all the other senseless killings he engages in. And this is especially true as the series goes on because the rest of the plot becomes increasingly tedious.

As the Jackal and Bianca get closer and closer to their diametrically opposed goals, the plot gets sillier and sillier. There are ridiculous chase sequences and foolish moves by both parties. Ultimately, though, the show doesn’t seem interested in having us ask why the Jackal or even Bianca do what they do, but how those in positions of power and means get away with doing horrible things. It’s a harsh lesson and not the one that you might have expected, but at the end of the day, it’s the thing “The Day of the Jackal” seems to care about most … at least until they find out if they’ve gotten a second season.

The first five episodes of “The Day of the Jackal” premiere on Peacock on November 14.