Once upon a time, there was a movie studio. The studio decided that it was tired of making new movies, and would rather just dust off some old ones and do remakes. They decided to hurl tons of money at the screen, so the films would look so shiny that nobody'd notice the lack of stories. The Jackal is to pop a high-profile government official for revenge. One catch here.
Nobody knows who the target is, only that a target has been chosen.
And no one has ever seen The Jackal before. He's known only by reputation and record. One man has seen him. One of the main problems is in the technique used to tell the two stories. We hop back and forth between Mulqueen's hunt for The Jackal and The Jackal's preparations for the hit.