YMMV / The Jackal

• Awesome Music: Massive Attack's "Superpredators" during the opening credits.
• Retroactive Recognition: Daniel Dae Kim plays the sniper that accompanies Mulqueen during the final shootout.
• Special Effect Failure: When the Jackal is testing out his BFG, you can clearly see the ammo belt fall off when he first aims it at Jack Black's character.
• Squick:
  • Jack Black's character getting his arm blown off by the Jackal's BFG. If you look closely, you can see it lying on the ground in a few shots.
  • Earlier, when the Jackal is getting chased by some few men at the underground parking lot, he sprays some poisonous liquid on the minivan's rear hatch handle. One of said Mooks sadly (not knowing what's on that handle) touches it, foam comes out his mouth before he chokes to death.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Even if it is still relatively easier to cross the Canada/US border than the Mexico/US border, this film showcases the pre-9/11 time when it was outright laughable.
  • The film is the poster child of that time Hollywood struggled to keep the Spy Fiction genre alive after the fall of the USSR. First, unlike the original, which was a deliberate period piece set in early '60s France, the film takes place in modern-day America and Russia. It begins with a montage summing up the history of Russia from Nicholas II to the fall of Communism and the rise of the film's villains, The Mafiya, in the 1990s. A joint American-Russian police operation (which itself dates the film to the Clinton-Yeltsin honeymoon when it seemed like the US and post-Soviet Russia would be allies) results in the death of a mobster's brother, who retaliates by hiring an assassin to kill a First Lady of the US that looks just like 1990s Hillary Clinton, during a public act with security so light it can only be before 2001.
  • But nothing will stick out more to a modern audience than the use of two ex-IRA and ETA^note This group is not identified by name members as the film heroes, presented here as romantic badasses that once fought for a just cause. Richard Gere's character, the ex-IRA man, is a sniper who only targets soldiers and doesn't use bombs, and is allowed to walk free in America after saving the day even though he was supposed to be handed back to British authorities to serve the rest of his prison sentence. It's a very ugly reminder that, before the 9/11 attacks, the IRA received a great deal of sympathy and support from certain segments of the American population that Hollywood was more than happy to cater to, a sympathy that evaporated after the attacks showed Americans the true horror of terrorism.

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