Keeley Hawes & Freddie Highmore in AMC+ Series

Equal parts stupidly entertaining and simply stupid, AMC+’s new hitwoman dramedy The Assassin gets far on the likable charm of stars Keeley Hawes and Freddie Highmore.

Whether that’s enough to carry what feels like a one-paragraph outline for a series rather than a fully conceived television season will depend on how you feel about beautiful European locations and hollow plot twists. Just days after finishing these opening six episodes, I remembered nothing that happened in the second half of the season. But I could still probably be cajoled to return for more of Hawes playing 007 and Highmore stammering charmingly. Maybe.

Both the strengths and limitations of The Assassin are standard operating procedure for creators Harry and Jack Williams, who are masters at hatching an enticing premise — see Rellik, Liar and The Tourist, among other shows — but less successful with following through.

After a terrific opening scene in which an assassin makes her way through a house under construction, ruthlessly taking out thugs and henchmen before getting some shocking news, we jump forward 31 years.

Julie (Hawes) has retired from her successful career killing people and now lives in a perfectly lovely home in the hills of a perfectly lovely Greek island, rarely interacting with the locals, other than occasionally bickering with town butcher Luka (Gerald Kyd). Which is funny, because she was formerly a different kind of butcher.

Edward (Highmore), Julie’s estranged son, is coming to the island for a visit. He’s a journalist. What kind of journalist? When I say “I haven’t the faintest idea,” I’m not exaggerating. His career is the flimsiest excuse for one tiny plot detail and nothing else. It doesn’t even give him a useful secondary set of skills that might come in handy later. It’s bizarrely pointless. Anyway, Edward has news to share with his mother, who he believes is a headhunter. Which is funny, because “headhunter” is a real and non-violent job that sounds like it could relate to a hired killer.

So like I said, Julie is retired, but then she gets a call from her former handler offering her three times her normal rate to kill Kayla (Shalom Brune-Franklin). Kayla is in charge of the charitable arm of a mining company owned by her father (Alan Dale, eventually), and she and her less charitable brother Ezra (Devon Terrell) are anchored off the coast of the island on a yacht. Why is Kayla in charge of the charitable arm of an otherwise potentially evil company? Because it’s a job title that lets you say “This character must be a good person” without having to have the character do anything good.

Julie takes the job but can’t pull the trigger, and soon a rather ambitious attempt on her life leaves the island littered with carnage, forces her to reveal her occupation to Edward, and throws the two of them together with Kayla, Ezra and, for no justifiable reason, Luka.

Soon, they’re all jaunting around a small corner of Europe — Greece, Albania and Establishing Shots of France and London — killing people and trying to stop people from killing them.

Oh and Gina Gershon is around as a woman named Marie who likes manga and knows things about Edward’s long-absent father. Why manga? I. Haven’t. The. Faintest. But she spends an entire episode sitting in a class on comic book art. Just … drawing.

The Assassin gets off to a promising enough start, capably directed by Lisa Mulcahy. The opening sequence and a shootout at a Greek wedding are the two best action sequences in the series. They may, in fact, be the only two truly memorable action sequences in the series — a good way to draw an audience in, but perhaps not the best way to sustain interest.

The pilot establishes the strained relationship between Julie and Edward but gives few details on Edward’s upbringing, other than that Julie was frequently leaving on “business trips” and she probably wasn’t well-suited for motherhood, what with the killing people thing. What matters is that when Julie zips around a country road on a motorcycle with Edward clinging to her in terror, the sight gag works and it’s character-appropriate.

While some viewers might think of Highmore as a good doctor or an aspiring chocolate factory owner, he’ll always be Norman Bates to me, so he’s perfectly suited for playing meek young men with mommy issues. He does flustered and confused well, and his comic timing is excellent. But the actor is hamstrung by the show’s failure to give Edward actual character details.

Hawes, as versatile a TV star as we have, is obviously enjoying getting to engage in gunplay and fight sequences, and does so convincingly. The show has no interest in grappling with the morality of Julie’s job, denying Hawes the opportunity for any real depth and making it weird that when dozens of people die because of her, neither the character nor the show finds it a problem. Shrug.

And those are the two developed characters! Kyd and Brune-Franklin are especially stranded with characters who are affectlessly “decent,” so they come and go from the series without any evident motivation or urgency. At some point, Kayla just catches an Uber from Albania to France. At a different point, Luka wanders off in a car, mainly to acquire a meat cleaver. Terrell is stuck playing Ezra as hunky and goofy, but otherwise negligible.

All that means is that there are main characters in the show who are incapable of making character-based decisions, so nothing they do makes sense as anything other than game pieces being moved around a board. Almost nothing anybody in The Assassin does makes sense for the person doing it. Nor does it not make sense. It’s just plot, expressed through pretty people.

That’s why I appreciate the actors who get to come in for an episode or two, be hammy and leave. There’s no requirement that they pass for real people. Jack Davenport has a suave, funny one-episode appearance as a fellow assassin from Julie’s past. Richard Dormer, so good in the Williams’ otherwise uneven Rellik, has a gruff, manic one-episode appearance as Julie’s former handler, though it made me yearn for his better one-episode guest turn in Peacock’s similar The Day of the Jackal. Dale and Gershon have slightly more extended roles, both chewing scenery well.

And the scenery is superb. The Greek islands are lush and verdant. Urban spaces in Greece and Albania are at least distinctively European. When houses and yachts are supposed to be signifiers of wealth, they’re properly opulent. Very little is done creatively in the different locations, but at least when Julie and Edward bicker on an Albanian hillside the vistas are quite nice.

Perhaps that’s enough, if your expectations are sufficiently low. This isn’t a dark and twisty hitman six-parter like Netflix’s Black Doves, or an over-extended and over-complicated 10-parter like the aforementioned Day of the Jackal. The Assassin is light, makes very little sense and will satisfy fans of Highmore and Hawes more than casual genre devotees.