Kill Jackie review – Catherine Zeta-Jones’ assassin thriller is like Killing Eve … minus good characters or plot

A freeport is somewhere you can store imported goods and not have to pay any of the duties usually required by the bothersome authorities until you move them out of there. It’s not quite what I expected to learn when watching a new crime-caper-comedy-thriller-cum-comeback-vehicle starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, but on the other hand I didn’t expect to learn anything at all so we could consider it a bonus.

The customs benefits and tax reliefs available in certain exclusionary zones are the carefully explained means by which Jackie Price (Zeta-Jones) has established a successful art business over the last 20 years. She acquires art, puts it in a warehouse, invites rich people to come and view it, bid on it and buy it. I don’t know if they bear the cost of the taxes themselves as they ship it home, or indeed whether this is included in the bid price or not. Having been led by the early scenes to believe there would be much more in the way of financial detail, I now find myself beset by questions.

No matter. The action is about to start. In fact, the action has already started – the very first scenes showed our girl exiting a lift in London and braining a security guard with a robust glass bowl she nicked from reception on the way past, before we cut back to Bilbao (where there does NOT, in fact, in real life appear to be a freeport at all! The magic of storytelling, folks!) two days earlier. Now we are just catching up, filling in the blanks – like a triptych buyer with a customs form – and looping back.

So. Life is good for Jackie, but perhaps just a bit … boring? The thrill of exploiting a tax loophole has somehow gone. This may explain why Zeta-Jones has chosen to have Jackie deliver all her lines in a manner that suggests she has recently received a brick to the head, but not why it continues long after all the excitement she has been craving returns with a narrative vengeance.

For Jackie has A Past! And that Past is about to catch up with her. The first clue is the dead body in the flat across from hers. A random murder? Jackie thinks not. A case of mistaken identity or a warning, she reckons, and prepares to get the hell out of Dodge. Alas, a gang of masked intruders surround her before she can flee. But wait! She has anticipated this. The paintings on the walls rise, machine guns emerge and duly rat-a-tat the men to death. Jackie lives to fight another day!

The woman who put in the machine gun arrangement for her, Karenina (Sidse Babett Knudsen, slightly unexpectedly) cheerfully reveals, as she is sawing up the masked corpses for easier disposal, that she is moving into assassination work and is on probation with the Seven Demons – the most feared of all assassin gangs – and guess who her next job is? That’s right! Jackie might like to leave now, before Karenina clocks on at midnight. Jackie agrees and takes her semi-competent assistant Charlie (Hattie Hook) and fanciable lawyer Sam (Daniel Ings) along with her – for their own protection, after other associates begin to fall victim to foul fates, because apparently hiring the Seven Demons means you do get all seven, even if one is already a friend of the target and could get close enough to shoot her any time you gave her the nod.

You will have gathered by now, I’m sure, that Kill Jackie is preposterous nonsense that may, somewhere near inception, have wanted to be Killing Eve but rapidly realised that that is a lot harder than it looks, and settled for throwing everything – especially heavy artillery – at the wall and seeing what stuck. Including at the page. “Someone wants me dead, and in the worst possible way,” mono-intones Jackie in one of the many droning voiceovers that bedevil the gaps between gunfights, fistfights, ear-bitings, car chases and other set pieces and substitutes for character, plot and the credible development of either. “How do I warn them of the biblical horrors coming for them without being needlessly dramatic?” she asks at the close of an inaugural episode that threatens no such thing. I’d rather know more about freeports, all in all.