text: This may well be the worst remake Hollywood has ever produced, and that's saying something. I'll take it further than that and say this movie is so stunningly, deliriously bad that IT MUST BE SEEN. I don't know if I'm even capable of tackling all the things wrong with it--like the fact that the casting director appears to have pulled names out of a hat, or the mind-blower of Richard Gere's character being allowed to walk away scot-free at the end (I'm sure the people saying, "It's just fiction, who cares" would have no problem if it was a former Al-Qaeda operative who just wants to return to his home country)--so I'll just devote my review to the utter hilarity, which is mainly the scene where Bruce Willis is testing out his gun. <br /><br />In the original version, you'll recall, the Jackal practices his kill on a pumpkin. The pumpkin explodes on impact, an effect known as "understatement." In THIS version, Willis sets up a pumpkin target, but he doesn't use a sniper rifle--he uses a gigantic remote-controlled cannon which costs tens of thousands of dollars and can only be stored in the back of a huge conspicuous minivan (this man likes a challenge). He reveals the cannon by pulling away a tarp, at which point Jack Black, who is there to observe, jumps around and says, "That ROCKS! This thing ROCKS!" about 18 times (I guess Willis didn't have to disassemble it first, he just lifted it, tarp and all, out of the back of the van, despite it probably weighing several tons). The scene then turns into an Austin Powers movie as Willis misses the pumpkin and takes out a tree, then has Black run through the mud with his pants falling down, finally blowing off Black's entire arm. The pumpkin falls to the ground, unharmed. <br /><br />If I can recommend this movie for ONE non-ironic reason, it's for the Diane Venora character as a tough Russian major who becomes romantically linked to Gere despite having a facial disfigurement--a bold move for a Hollywood feature. By mid- movie I was really liking this character, so it was a shame when she had to be killed. I would have liked to see a movie about her. Other than that, this pile of crap is only useful as an objective intelligence test. 3/10.