Bugs in the plot

I just saw the film on a cable channel and without pointing my finger at any precise bug right here, I feel it wrecks because
1)no pro killers or policemen would be this emotional or this careless with security in their job. The scene where the killer meets with his employer in the garage, leaves him the gun and then at once is knocked out and killed with a plastic bag is good for a laugh only, as well as the scene where a guy who's supposed to be Christer Pettersson is phoned up "Would you like half a kilo of amphetamine?" :-) Those scenes violate both any sense of reality and our belief in the people involved.

2)Roger is a completely impossible cop and also blatantly copped (excuse the pun) from Jim Garrison in JFK. Same sense of mission, same tension between his overriding work and a wife and kids whom he can't tell everything and who feel estranged from him, even the same crime.

I'd also agree (about the tennis hall attempt) with the OP that no pro assassin would try to do the job, in full daylight, from a rooftop which is clearly used by the people living in the house pretty often (and never if they actually come up there as he's preparing for the act!) In The Man on the Roof, the protagonist picks a tenement roof, but a) he's in an unstable mental state, and b) he blocks the stairways to the roof as soon as he's come up there, and he's too highly-strung to bother much about how to escape from there after shooting a number of cops; it's implied that he'd fight until someone drops a bomb on him.

Shooting a VIP from a rooftop close by would also make it very hard to escape (a pro would do it from a greater distance). This is just one of the many instances of sloppy storyboarding in the film.

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You don't even understand what you're talking about.

1. Why should he know Swedish? How many British people know Swedish? It isn't plausible that some British hitman speaks Swedish fluently.

3. Where is it shown that the police was corrupt?

4. No professional hitman would be hanging out on such a rooftop with a gun, first assembling it and then disassembling it in broad daylight.

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2. The fake passport was not enough to arrest the guy, when there was something else afoot.

3. The apartment block roof was a plot device; in practice Gales could have taken the shot, then capped the women, but that would be messy.

I think these two give an idea why you demand a lot less of realistic. coherent plotting than the OP and myself do. To you, it's clearly okay as long as it looks cool and you view e.g. the failed attempt on the apartment building roof as a 'prop' for what it would really have looked like: in reality he might have done it from a bit further off and he'd have killed the women, but that would have made the scene less fun and involved too many running cops at this stage of the story, so we'll do it like this instead. Same with the hokey passport that was actually noticed by the policemen: if we can create some "what-if" tension, why not, even though a real high-demand pro asassin would not have bungled that kind of essential preparative step?

Sure, the film was made for entertainment and doesn't pretend to "tell the truth", but it fails to show a realistic killer or credible cops. The Day of the Jackal has no 'prop scenes' in the style of "Charlie's Angels" like that, everything there is shown in the way it might have happened. Now, you're Canadian and I'm from Sweden (so is the OP I think)., The movie picks up on a real-life political assassination that happened a little over twenty years ago and which is still unsolved and the subject of heated debate in this country, If it were a film about the still hot murder of a Canadian public man, or about the Polytechnique massacre of 1989, I suspect you wouldn't have felt so easy with an obviously cartoonishly plotted movie.

After the revolution everything will be different. Your password is 'Giliap'!

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