• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

The bloody massacre of a couple of dozen innocent people is positioned as entertainment in a new action thriller coming to AMC+ this week.

Titled “The Assassin,” this six-part series spared no expense to marshal all of the production tools necessary to choreograph a scene of mass death and make it real.

The list includes guns, ammo, gallons of fake blood, a couple of hundred of those things that were once called “blood squibs” that simulate the blood bursting from a bullet wound, and makeup people who specialize in turning low-paid extras into blood-soaked corpses.

Networks and producers call it storytelling, character development or exposition. When I see these kinds of scenes, I wonder: What were they thinking?

What kind of people are these who go to so much effort to create scenes of such extreme violence? 

I wonder: Do they ever have second thoughts or regrets about what they did? That is doubtful because the hits just keep on coming.

“The Assassin” tells the story of a Ninja-like hitwoman who cut quite a lethal figure in her younger days in the 1990s. 

But when we meet her in the present day, she is long retired and truth be told, a little bored living alone on a remote Greek isle where she moved long ago to live a simpler life.

The woman (played by Keeley Hawes) has an emotionally distant relationship with her grown son (Freddie Highmore, above photo), who comes to visit her in Episode One. 

He knows nothing of her former career, but within a day of his visit, he finds himself learning a great deal about his mom after he nearly becomes collateral damage in a massacre of townsfolk innocently attending a quaint outdoor wedding.

The worst part of it is: All of those people -- a couple of dozen at least, although I did not count them -- were killed for the simple reason that a sniper with terrible marksmanship skills was aiming at her.

But he kept missing her and in the process, slaughtered almost the entire population of this tiny village, leaving them bloody and disfigured amid their overturned chairs.

To add insult to injury, the multi-tiered wedding cake mostly survived, but it was splattered with the blood of the very people who had come there to eat it.

At no point, did the retired assassin express or show any remorse for the mass killing of people she had lived among for years and whose deaths can be traced, at least in part, to her violent past.

As far as I could determine, the only survivors of the bloodletting were the assassin, her son and a man from the village who owned the butcher shop.

I am no prude when it comes to filmed violence. I find the “John Wick” movies to be fascinating in a sick way. But at least in those movies, John Wick’s attackers and victims are all bad guys.

In the Greek massacre seen in Episode One of “The Assassin,” most of the bad guys involved in committing the massacre survive, but the innocents all died.

It all seemed so unnecessary to me. No pun intended, but the scene was literally overkill.

If you want to show the consequences of leading a life of violence, then it can probably be shown with a lot fewer deaths -- say, two or three instead of 30.

“The Assassin” starts streaming on Thursday (November 20) on AMC+.