The Assassin is everything the title suggests it will be. A one person army who can take out multiple people with one perfect shot to the head while never getting hurt themselves. Then they walk away from the killing ground without a worry or look back.

The Assassin is a typical example of the genre with a far-fetched unrealistic plot, except for one thing. The lead character, Julie (Keeley Hawes), is a menopausal retired woman living on an obscure Greek island. She thinks she’s out of the business and then gets a strange phone call from her former handler. She’s to kill someone on a yacht.

She has the person in her sights and then decides not to go through with it. All sorts of things happen after that decision. The big one is her son Edward (Freddie Highmore) shows up unexpectedly. He’s full of questions about who his father is and about a ton of money he just received from an unknown source.

Julie and Edward go to a wedding in the village. Bullets start to fly. Julie realizes the guns are aimed at her. By the time she and Edward escape unscathed every single person at the wedding is dead except the local butcher Luka (Gerald Kyd).

Julie and Edward jump in the ocean and swim to the yacht (yes, that yacht). Luka follows behind. On the yacht they find Kayla (Shalom Brune-Franklin) and her brother Ezra (Devon Terrell). Sure enough, Kayla is the woman Julie was supposed to kill. And she’s Edward’s fiancée. Surprise, mom!

From that beginning the series rambles all over the world – Libya, Spain, France, Algeria, back to Greece. Their travails turn out to have something to do with Kayla and Ezra’s father, Aaron Cross (Alan Dale). He’s the shady head of a huge wealthy company. He’s trying to keep something secret from his children.

A former IT guy in the Cross corporation, Jasper (David Dencik), claims to know the secret. He get tangled up in the story, too. He has his own subplot.

And then there’s Marie (Gina Gershon). Let me tell you, Gina Gershon can make an entrance. She adds another plot line to the tangled web of a series and is after Edward. She claims to be his aunt with knowledge about his father.

Nobody can be trusted. People get murdered in every episode. It’s action packed. It’s not a great series, but I enjoyed watching Keeley Hawes and Freddie Highmore develop as characters and as a team as they shared banter.

At times the series looked like a video game. There were elements of manga in one character’s story, and occasional echoes of manga sometimes appeared in the series. In fact, I wondered if the plot of the series was actually based on a manga comic, but it doesn’t mention anything about that in the trivia for the film on IMDb.

The series has six episodes. Half of the episodes were directed by Lisa Mulcahy. I watched it on AMC+ but you can find it on Sling TV, The Roku Channel, YouTube and the big rental spots like Prime Video. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to pay extra money to rent this one, but it’s a bit of fun if you can get it without an extra charge.