There’s an old clich‚ about movies that have story problems. I’ve often heard, “That movie has plot holes so big you could drive a truck through them.”

Well, “The Jackal” goes way beyond the truck analogy.

Here, there are holes big enough to fly a Boeing 747 through. Big enough for a complete school of sperm whales to swim through. Plot holes so large you could hide entire European countries inside them.

Bruce Willis is the movie’s title character, an international assassin hired to gun down the first lady. He jets between Chicago, Moscow, Helsinki, Washington, D.C. and Virginia, constantly changing his clothes, weight, sexual orientation and (most importantly) hair.

Richard Gere plays Declan, an IRA terrorist who the FBI releases from prison in order to help them track down the Jackal. Why they release him is never clear. I think they did it so they could put Gere’s name on the movie posters.

Even harder to accept than Gere as a bad-ass IRA terrorist is trying to accept Gere’s Irish accent. It is so bad it’s laughable, supplying the movie’s only real comic moments.

It sounds like he modeled his voice after the leprechaun in the Lucky Charms commercials. I kept expecting to hear Gere say, “Stay away from me Lucky Charms.” Not only that, but the accent had a tendency to come and go throughout the movie.

Now, more on the problems with the story. (I’ll probably have to eventually consult a thesaurus when I run out of synonyms for preposterous.)

“The Jackal” literally raises a hundred questions because of its completely illogical situations. I swear, watching this movie would actually make Spock’s head explode due to the ludicrous nature of it all.

For example, the Jackal has a minivan he paints with a special white paint that washes off with water to change its color. OK, so what happens if it rains? When he sprays it down in a parking garage, where exactly did he get the high pressure water hose? From his pants?

The FBI is always hot on the Jackal’s trail. How the FBI is figuring things out is never clear. Answers just seem to come to them by divine intervention.

Like when Declan figures out they’ve been protecting the wrong target. Conveniently, his revelation comes just in time to save the real target.

Or when the FBI figures out the Jackal is taking a yacht into Chicago to smuggle his weapon in. An angel from heaven came down and spoke to Declan in a dream saying, “He’s coming by ship.” (Not really, but it might as well have happened that way.)

Later, the FBI is specifically looking for minivans. (Because the angel came back and told them to look for minivans.) And yet, nobody seems to notice a red minivan parked a block away from where the first lady is speaking that has dark, tinted windows you can’t see into. The big clue later should be the big cannon sticking out the van’s back window, yet this also goes unnoticed.

It’s all so preposterous — wait, I already used that word. Hold on — OK, it’s all so absurd, implausible and ridiculous. Future editions of my thesaurus should also include “The Jackal” as a synonym for preposterous.

1 star out of five.

Mike Milik is a senior in advertising from West Des Moines.