• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, September 29, 2026

The new AMC+ thriller “Kill Jackie” takes its cues from movies, TV shows and music ranging from Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns to Dusty Springfield.

The show’s similarities to other action movies and TV shows are impossible to miss. With its fast-moving, European location-hopping, and choreographed violence, “Kill Jackie” bears resemblances to the action movies of director Guy Ritchie.

The show shares a song with Ritchie’s first movie, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” -- Dusty Springfield’s 1968 version of “Spooky.”

The title of “Kill Jackie” is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movies, although the TV show and the movies have nothing else in common.

But most of all, the title character of “Kill Jackie” is a swashbuckling former cocaine queenpin whose talent for thwarting would-be assassins has a John Wick vibe.

In the role of Jackie, Catherine Zeta-Jones is the show’s undisputed star.

In the show, Jackie is a broker in the shadowy world of black-market, multimillion-dollar artworks, having taken up the vocation 20 years earlier after exiting the international cocaine trade.

And suddenly, she becomes the target of an international organization of assassins reminiscent of the High Table of the “John Wick” movies.

The reasons why they are after her are murky, although it might have something to do with the way she made her exit from the cocaine business.

With assassins on her trail, Jackie is a fierce female John Wick in expensive boots and designer sunglasses. 

John Wick piles up more victims than Jackie, but Jackie is more ruthless. The character is reminiscent of the female cocaine dealer in “Griselda,” a 2024 Netflix series starring Sofia Vergara as a bat-wielding empress of the south Florida drug trade in 1978.

In one scene in “Kill Jackie,” an assassin drawing a bead on his target is depicted in the same manner as Clint Eastwood sizing up four gunmen who were about to become his victims in “Fistful of Dollars” (1967).

In another scene in “Kill Jackie,” Jackie is referred to as “little miss dynamite,” the nickname more commonly associated with Brenda Lee, the young teen singing sensation of the 1950s.

In “Kill Jackie,” Zeta-Jones, 57, uses a Welsh accent, which is rare for her even though she happens to be Welsh.

Perhaps in a nod to her own Welsh heritage, another famous Welsh native, Tom Jones, figures into one scene in a very unpredictable way.

It’s not unusual for “Kill Jackie” to go off in unpredictable directions. That’s what makes it so much fun to watch.

AMC+ will premiere one episode of the eight-episode “Kill Jackie” each week starting this coming Friday (October 2).