Kill Jackie Review: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Kill Jackie throws everything it can at the screen, gunfights, car chases, assassin gangs, but never bothers to build believable characters or a coherent plot, leaving Catherine Zeta-Jones stranded in a genuinely preposterous thriller.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Platform: Prime Video
Genre: Crime Thriller
Cast: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Hattie Hook, Daniel Ings
A freeport, in case you were wondering, is a place where you can store imported goods and avoid paying the usual duties until you actually move them out. That is not exactly what you expect to learn while watching a crime caper thriller doubling as a comeback vehicle for Catherine Zeta-Jones, but given how little else Kill Jackie actually offers, we will count it as a small bonus.
That customs loophole is how Jackie Price, played by Zeta-Jones, has built a successful art business over the past twenty years. She acquires art, stores it in a warehouse, invites wealthy buyers to view and bid on it, and keeps the operation running smoothly within the tax-friendly confines of her freeport setup.
For a show that initially seems eager to explain its financial mechanics in detail, Kill Jackie abandons that thread almost as quickly as it introduces it, leaving plenty of unanswered questions once the actual plot kicks in.
And that plot kicks in fast. The opening scene shows Jackie exiting a lift in London and knocking out a security guard with a glass bowl she grabbed from the front desk before the story jumps back two days earlier to Bilbao, where, notably, no actual freeport exists in real life, to fill in exactly how she got there.
Life is good for Jackie, if perhaps a little boring these days, the thrill of exploiting tax loopholes having apparently worn off. That might explain why Zeta-Jones delivers most of her lines with a strangely flat, almost dazed energy throughout, though it does not quite explain why that tone continues even once the show’s promised excitement finally arrives.
Because Jackie, naturally, has a past, and that past is catching up with her fast. A dead body shows up in the flat across from hers, which Jackie immediately reads as either a case of mistaken identity or a direct warning, prompting her to try to flee.
Before she can escape, a group of masked intruders surrounds her, only for the paintings on her walls to rise and reveal hidden machine guns that promptly take care of the threat. Jackie survives to fight another day, naturally.
The woman behind that elaborate gun setup, Karenina, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, cheerfully reveals while disposing of the bodies that she is transitioning into assassination work, currently on probation with a feared group of killers known as the Seven Demons.
Her next target, of course, turns out to be Jackie herself. Jackie quickly gathers her semi-competent assistant Charlie, played by Hattie Hook, and charming lawyer Sam, played by Daniel Ings, and the three go on the run as more of Jackie’s associates start meeting increasingly gruesome fates.
By this point, it becomes fairly obvious that Kill Jackie wanted to be a show like Killing Eve, clever, character-driven, darkly funny—before quickly realizing just how difficult that actually is to pull off, and settling instead for throwing endless gunfights, car chases, and over-the-top set pieces at the screen in place of real character development or plot logic.
Even the dialogue suffers from this approach, with droning voiceovers filling the gaps between action sequences rather than actually building toward anything meaningful.
In the end, Kill Jackie is loud, chaotic, and entirely hollow at its core, the kind of show that mistakes constant motion for genuine tension. Honestly, at this point, learning more about freeports sounds like the more interesting option.
If you’re looking for something completely different this week, our review of Love and our review of Prem Keetanu are both worth checking out too.