“The trouble with magic tricks,” Catherine Zeta-Jones says as Jackie Price in the eight-episode AMC+ crime thriller Kill Jackie, “is that they stop being magic.” And so it is that the crew of assassins trying to snuff her out kill her boredom instead, and become the hunted themselves. 

KILL JACKIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: Jackie Price (Zeta-Jones), with a bandage around her head, dumps out a bowl of Bomb Pops in an elevator. She addresses herself in the mirror. “You again.”

The Gist: In voiceover, Jackie says she’s only in the international art market for the money. It’s lucrative, dealing paintings to the rich. But is it exciting? Once, Jackie sold cocaine. “What I used to do for a living was pretty scuzzy,” she tells her faithful assistant Charlie (Hattie Hook). But that shit was exciting. Until, as Kill Jackie reveals in vague flashbacks, that shit got dangerous. And so, when Jackie returns home to London from her base of operations in Bilbao, Spain, only to thwart a violent attempt on her life, she figures it must be an unpaid past debt. Assassins targeting her after 20 years? This could offer the excitement she craves.

Kill Jackie is a gender-switched rendition of The Price You Pay, a pseudonymous 2018 novel by Nick Harkaway. And it’s built around CZJ, her charming Welsh lilt, and her rendering of Jackie as someone amused by the destruction all around her. As assassins pursue her, she will run, alongside Charlie and fish-out-of-water lawyer Sam (Daniel Ings), and try to determine one thing. Not how to survive — the gleam in Jackie’s eye says she’s got that sorted. No, the thing to determine is how exactly — how excitingly — she’ll do in the bunch sent to do her.  

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? CZJ returns to TV with Kill Jackie, but she’s been here before, most recently as Morticia in Wednesday.  

Our Take: We’ll take Kill Jackie like a comic book. Let this series reveal gatling guns in apartment walls, and its assumption that everyone in Jackie’s life is on the take. Let it exist in a world that’s ostensibly real, but with no recognizable functions. Let its violence be outlandish, with zero accountability. And let it introduce another round of assassins who take themselves too seriously. The High Table? Nah. These are the Seven Demons. Who we think will be no match for Jackie’s wits and savvy. In other words, like a comic book, we’ll probably keep “reading” til the double-spread page where the tables are turned. To consider Kill Jackie with any more seriousness would be a mistake.

Performance Worth Watching: Decider redundancy department: Daniel Ings wins again. Every time he’s in something, Ings totally steals it; with Kill Jackie, his manic, I-don’t-know-what-is-happening energy is the infusion this series needs.   

Sex and Skin: Some suggestive moments. But don’t expect “take me against the bread bin” levels of spiciness, to use a Jackie phrase. Too much havoc happening. 

Parting Shot: Jackie’s ruminations over her jet setter’s life being a bore are silenced when she is targeted for violence. She grins at this destruction. “I get to do me again…” 

Our Call: Kill Jackie gets a conditional STREAM IT. A shallow cartoon comic of a series, it nevertheless features an engaging Catherine Zeta-Jones and some supporting cast hijinks. How long we stay with it is another matter.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.