Kill Jackie Review

There’s a moment early on in the eight-episode run of Kill Jackie where Catherine Zeta-Jones (who plays the titular Jackie) is required to break down over the loss of someone very close to her. And Zeta-Jones does her absolute best to emote, crying out, wailing, really trying to sell it. Only, her face? It doesn’t move. Nothing changes in her expression, there’s nothing. And that moment is really emblematic of the series as a whole – throughout its run, characters are constantly placed in extreme circumstances (that’s par for the course with a thriller structured like this one) but the tone of the show is so all over the place that it’s hard to take much of what is happening seriously. Some truly heinous things occur – most of which happen to bad guys, so we’re meant to care less about them – but the strangely light, humorous, sardonic tone of the show wants us to treat these acts as something to cringe at with a smile rather than something to use as an indictment against our central character. Hell, the show even provides an audience surrogate in the form of Jackie’s lawyer, Sam (played by Daniel Ings, who recently stole scenes on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms), but it treats him as overly worried and a wet blanket most of the time rather than the only sane person on this show. But, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here.

What, exactly, is Kill Jackie? Well, it’s a revenge thriller about an ex-drug kingpin turned black market art dealer (that would be Jackie) who has a hit taken out against her by a disgruntled client. This hit comes in the form of the Seven Dragons, a series of seven assassins who are tasked, one at a time, to come after Jackie and try to kill her. Their handler is played, with unhinged joy, by the great Sidse Babett Knudsen (Borgen, Westworld). Jackie is forced to try to kill off the assassins while protecting Sam and her personal assistant Charlie. It’s violent, filled with flashbacks and flashforwards (which is a bit disconcerting at first, but less so as the show goes on), and much of the story hinges on the believability of Zeta-Jones’ performance and how much we care about Jackie. And that’s where much of the show’s problems lie.

Like I said, Zeta-Jones opts to play the character as almost totally devoid of emotions. It’s not just that she’s not physically able to emote*, she also opts to just keep Jackie a totally flat character throughout much of the series. The few moments we do get to see her take joy or exhibit any emotion come about around attempts to take out the various assassins. She’s enjoying the cat and mouse game – even when it places those she claims to care about in harm’s way – and she thrives on the chase. She’s having fun – until something bad happens to someone she loves. And then she’s angry, sad, worried, frustrated until such time as the story requires her to slough it off and move on. Now, I’m aware that there are a host of male characters throughout film and television who have had a similar attitude toward being hunted – at the top of that list would be almost every James Bond – but what many of those characters have is the charisma to win over the audience despite the horrible things they do and their general lack of worry about collateral damage. Jackie, as written and portrayed, doesn’t have that crucial element to win over the audience. And that’s the show’s fatal flaw.

*I don’t like commenting on how a performer, especially a woman, looks in a review. I fully recognize the double standard in the entertainment industry that allows men to age normally without any penalty while women struggle to find work over the age of 40. But when the physical appearance of an actor is a true liability to the performance, series, and character, that’s when I feel like I need to make a comment on it.

If we don’t trust and care about Jackie, the show doesn’t work. We don’t have to condone everything she does, but we absolutely need to want to watch her work. And with that crucial element missing from the character, the show just starts to feel like an exercise in futility. We don’t want to see those around Jackie – such as Charlie or Sam – suffer as a result of her actions (even though both are complicit, on some level, through their work and relationship with her), but we don’t care all that much about Jackie or her fate. By halfway through the series, I was actively rooting for Jackie and the assassins to just kill one another off.

Which is a bummer, because I know that Zeta-Jones can be incredibly charismatic, even when playing morally gray characters (see her Oscar-winning work in Chicago for a great example of her walking the line between dangerous and sardonically charming). And if she brought that same level of charm to Jackie (and the writing gave her the tools to do so), this could have been an absolute delight – watching her outwit the bad guys while trying to keep her team alive. But as it stands, it’s just a disappointing miss.

Kill Jackie premieres on AMC+ on October 2. All eight episodes were provided for review.