‘Kill Jackie’ Review: Catherine Zeta-Jones Leads AMC+’s Drab Misfire of a Thriller

Several times in the first episode of AMC+’s Kill Jackie, the question comes up of whether its protagonist (Catherine Zeta-Jones) might be a bit bored.

Jackie’s friend suggests her “chronic feelings of ennui” might be blamed on the “mental and emotional disturbances that plague our modern society.” Jackie herself likens her career as an art dealer to a “magic trick,” but then muses that the problem with mastering tricks is that “they stop being magic.”

Kill Jackie

The Bottom Line Dead on arrival.

Airdate: Friday, Oct. 1 (AMC+)
Cast: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Daniel Ings, Óscar Jaenada, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Darci Shaw, Raff Law, Christine Adams, Julian Rhind-Tutt
Creator: Tom Butterworth and Connor Keane, based on The Price You Pay by Nick Harkaway

Having watched all eight hour-long episodes, I’m ready to posit another explanation: Maybe Jackie’s feeling blah because there simply isn’t anything about her world worth getting excited over. Shallowly conceived and haphazardly constructed, Kill Jackie is a thriller fatally short on thrills.

One imagines it must have all sounded very zippy on paper, else it’s hard to imagine why creators Tom Butterworth and Conor Keane would have chosen to adapt Nick Harkaway’s novel The Price You Pay into a series. The elements of a juicy potboiler are certainly all present and accounted for.

Our antiheroine Jackie is not just an art dealer, but one who’s operated so consistently at such an elite level that not even eight-figure sales to billionaires quicken her pulse anymore — or maybe it’s just that this private-jet-setting life can’t match the rush of her old life as the dealer behind the world’s finest cocaine. But before she can decide what to do about this restlessness, the choice is made for her. An unseen someone has hired the Seven Demons, an elite band of assassins, to kill her, for reasons that are initially unclear but that Jackie reasonably assumes must be connected to her past. Jackie reacts by deciding to hunt down the killers before they can get to her.

The quest takes Jackie — generally sporting a shiny outfit and a bold lip — all over northern Spain, from the turquoise coasts of Bilbao to the majestic peaks of the Pyrenees. It brings her up against all manner of colorfully sadistic killers, from a snakeskin-boot-wearing gunman known only as The Cuban (Sebastian Armesto) to a parkour-loving hipster (Tadashi Ito’s Li Dong). In addition to the standard-issue stabbings and shootouts and car chases, there’s death by vegetable peeler and liquid nitrogen, talk of testicle-eating, and an offer of medically administered multiple orgasms.

But the orgasms never come. The cannibalism and the flaying are only discussed, not seen. The action we do get is insipid and perfunctory. The assassins that look so snazzy on first impression turn out to have all the depth of unlicensed Spirit Halloween costumes. The supposedly glamorous trappings — a beaded wedding gown, a snazzy car, verdant hills — are rendered in the cheap, dull look endemic to mediocre streaming series, robbing us of even the pleasures of a pretty picture.

Zeta-Jones makes an uninspiring lead, overshooting the character’s unruffled cool so she lands closer to affectless. It does not help that her range of facial expressions is unforgivingly narrow, rarely extending beyond mild surprise, mild disappointment or mild amusement. Her voice, at least, has more feeling — it runs the gamut from moderately playful to moderately angry to moderately sad — and it’s genuinely lovely to hear Zeta-Jones’ natural Welsh accent for once. But there’s only so much she can do with a clichéd backstory and sub-car-commercial lines like “Do you know what’s really sexy — I’m talking weak at the knees, take-me-against-the-bread-bin sexy? Export taxes.”

Some of her costars fare slightly better. Óscar Jaenada brings a welcome gravitas to Zigor, a revenge-minded ex-Demon who allies with Jackie. Christine Adams is playing yet another half-baked Demon, but she imbues The Doc with just enough wryness to suggest an actual personality under her dominatrix-by-way-of-Thom-Browne outfits. And Daniel Ings is the ensemble’s single greatest asset as Sam, a normie tax attorney who has no idea how he’s wound up in this mess to begin with. Never one to hold back as his characters spiral into emotional extremes, he’s the show’s sweaty, ranty, wild-eyed comic bright spot.

But none of these fleeting highlights are enough to justify a show that otherwise gives the viewer precious little to hang onto. Kill Jackie makes occasional half-hearted stabs at deepening its title character. A pair of younger sidekicks, Jackie’s loyal assistant Charlie (Hattie Hook) and a surly stranger named Gwen (Darci Shaw), seem designed to bring out her softer side, but both relationships are drawn with strokes too quick and broad to generate the emotion they ought to. Flirty (separate) interactions with Sam and The Doc might be intended to inject some sexiness into the proceedings, but a dearth of chemistry makes the prospect of a hookup seem more confusing than enticing.

Meanwhile, the things we’re told comprise Jackie’s formidable skill set are actually mostly delegated to a shadowy organization known as Poltergeist. The Iceland-based outfit handles Jackie’s banking, finds her unfindable targets, supplies her with every gadget and weapon she could possibly need — leaving Jackie with basically nothing to do but wait around looking scared and/or cool. One starts to wonder, after the umpteenth time a Poltergeist agent shows up to just hand her a briefcase with whatever impossible-to-get item she requires, why we aren’t simply watching a show about that team instead.

As it is, there’s no there there. Certainly there’s nothing to recommend this over countless other shows across countless other networks. If you want to watch a badass lady shoot her way across Europe, you might try Amazon’s (unfortunately canceled) Ride or Die or Netflix’s (finally returning) Black Doves. If you’re into the idea of a world populated by gimmicky costumed assassins, John Wick has roughly 10,000 sequels and spinoffs and knockoffs; I can’t promise those are all great either, but they’re mostly no worse than this mediocrity. If you’re a Daniel Ings superfan, you’ll be better served by HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms or Netflix’s The Gentlemen.

If you’re dying to watch Zeta-Jones act in her Welsh accent — well, okay, you’ve got me there. You should watch Kill Jackie. Everyone else should feel free to save themselves.