Kill Jackie
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
Jackie Price sells art now. Twenty years of it: Lisbon galleries, private jets, a lawyer on speed dial, an anonymity she paid for in installments nobody talks about. The opening act of Kill Jackie lets that life look exactly as boring as its hero claims, which is the smartest move the series makes, because then the Seven Demons arrive, an elite hit squad hired to end her, and Catherine Zeta-Jones gets to flip a switch that has been off-screen for two decades. The switch is the whole show. A woman who was supposedly running from her past discovers she is much, much better at the old job than the new one, and enjoys it more too.
The credits tell you who’s pulling the strings: co-created by Conor Keane and Tom Butterworth with producer Peter Lawson and director Damon Thomas, the bench behind Gangs of London and Killing Eve, which is less a coincidence than a business plan. The show borrows those productions’ central trick: take a domestic surface, put a killer underneath, and let the audience enjoy how good the killer is at housekeeping murder. Here the set pieces run from gun hidden inside artwork to Zeta-Jones limping across Westminster Bridge in hospital scrubs, a nod to 28 Days Later the trailer made obvious. Filmed in Bilbao, Lisbon, London and Swansea on Fremantle and Steel Springs budgets, it looks like money.
The tonal question is the interesting one. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 50% across ten early reviews, and the split tracks the same fault line critics found in Killing Eve’s later seasons: how long can a show wink while its lead guts people with a bridge-cable before the wink curdles? The early word is mixed-to-warm on Zeta-Jones, cooler on the script’s reliance on quips between kill rooms. Daniel Ings plays Sam, the lawyer who keeps saying no with increasing confidence as Jackie keeps not listening, and the supporting wall (Sidse Babett Knudsen, Christine Adams as The Doc, Ron Perlman doing Ron Perlman things) is the kind of cast a show this lean didn’t strictly need.
We’re rating after the full run, not the trailer. What we can promise already: eight episodes, every one titled after a song, from Talking Heads (Burning Down the House) to Scorpions (Wind of Change), one sitting, all released today. If you want a revenge thriller that quotes pop music while reloading, this is the week to watch it, and we’ll have the number and the argument within days.