What is with the Americans and their fascination with dramatised war? Over the years, we’ve had films set in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran – amounting to endless hours of watching grizzled marines with rifles trying to fight their way through hostile territory.
Often, it’s a bit of a sausage fest, but Paramount+’s latest series, Special Ops: Lioness, offers up a different perspective.
Opening in Iran, we watch as an American undercover agent is compromised while on a mission to infiltrate terror group ISIS. They’re dragged kicking and screaming out of their hiding place… before a missile blows both them to kingdom come.
The twist? The undercover agent is a woman – and the person who gives the order to blow her up is her supervising officer, Joe.
See, Joe (Zoe Saldaña) is part of Lioness, an elite squad of special ops women that, as she tells it, started out with the job of frisking Muslim women suspected of being affiliated with terrorist groups. Now, their job is slightly more complicated: “what we do now is locate wives and girlfriends and daughters of high value targets, and we place an operative close to them.”
“The operative makes friends with the suspect, earns their trust, leads us to the target, and we kill the target,” she tells newbie Cruz Manuelos (an excellent Laysla De Oliveira), who doesn’t bat an eyelid.
That’s all well and good, because Cruz is the person selected to replace the unfortunate lost right at the beginning of the series. She’s hard as nails: a rather harrowing opening sequence fills us in on the specifics of her backstory, featuring an abusive boyfriend, chaotic home life and a seedy past.
Naturally, once she makes it to the Marines, she’s away – as the sometimes-corny dialogue makes clear, Cruz is a tough cookie. Smarter and stronger than pretty much all of her fellow recruits (on her first day, she executes 19 pull-ups, which seemed both impressive and unfeasible), she’s a shoo-in for the dubious honour of undercover agent.
Flown over to Kuwait, she’s given a target, and sent to make friends with a terrorist’s rich daughter. And then… what? I’m not actually sure, because we were only given one episode to review, and most of that episode was spent setting up the premise of the main plot.
There’s not much to go on, but nevertheless, the performances are uniformly good. Saldaña is superb as Joe: cool, calculated, self-restrained, with a home life she barely experiences and kids she barely sees. In the first ten minutes, she orders a hit on her undercover agent; in the last, she’s telling her replacement that she’ll get her out if her cover is blown: “you can count on me for that.” Oof: stone cold.
Opposite her is De Oliveira, who shines as the defiant, furious Cruz. Oh, and Nicole Kidman makes an appearance, but only for about five minutes, as Joe’s boss. Morgan Freeman, though trialled in the credits, is yet to appear – I did say this was star-studded.
So, is this any good? It’s hard to tell at the moment, but the beginning looks promising: there are huge explosions, the tense scenes are nail-biting, and Saldaña carries the whole thing ably on her shoulders. When she’s on screen and issuing orders, you absolutely believe her: here’s hoping the rest of the series manages to ride that high.
