Zoe Saldaña is joined by Academy Award winners Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman in the Paramount+ military thriller “Special Ops: Lioness,” but these A-listers might be taking a back seat to the Canadian actress Laysla De Oliveira, based on De Oliveira’s brilliant and hardcore turn in the pilot episode. Playing a survivor of physical abuse who abandons her dead-end life in Oklahoma to realize the potential she once demonstrated as a high schooler, De Oliveira delivers a star-power performance. We can’t wait to see how this series plays out.
The latest blood-stained action series from the prolific Taylor Sheridan (“Yellowstone,” “Tulsa King,” “Sicario”) is pure fiction but is inspired by real-life U.S. military programs such as the counterinsurgency and cultural outreach effort known as Team Lioness. (The series takes the concept to next-level, combat extremes.) Saldaña delivers gritty and authentic work as Joe, the leader of a covert CIA organization that sends female operatives into undercover missions where they befriend the wives, girlfriends, mothers or siblings of women who have close connections to high-level terrorists.
In the breathtaking, cinematically ambitious opening sequence to the series, Joe is overseeing ops from the CIA/SOCOM (Special Operations Command) Outpost in Kobane, Syria, when she learns her plant’s cover has been blown and she has been taken by ISIS. Knowing her soldier’s fate is almost certainly sealed, Joe must decide if she should try to orchestrate some kind of Hail Mary rescue mission or make the excruciatingly tough call to bomb the compound where her plant is being held, thus taking out dozens of the enemy but also killing her own operative. This is Joe’s job. This is what she does.
Flashback to four years ago and Oklahoma City, where De Oliveira’s Cruz is slinging burgers at all hours before coming home to an abusive boyfriend and his no-good thug friends. We eventually learn Cruz was a star athlete and an honors student in high school, but after her mother died (her father is nowhere in the picture), she gave up and fell into a downward spiral.
Escaping her abuser and sleeping in the park because she literally has nowhere else to go, Cruz enlists in the Marines and immediately displays alpha skills, whether it’s a physical challenge or in the classroom, where’s she scoring in the 99th percentile. This is Cruz’s best and last chance to make a difference and to make something of herself, and she is embracing it with fearsome dedication.
Meanwhile, Joe’s supervisor, Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman), has given Joe instructions to “Go to [Ft.] Bragg, make another one,” i.e., find another star female recruit to join Joe’s ops team and eventually go undercover. Just like that, Cruz has been handpicked by Joe and is meeting the obligatory trash-talking, beer-downing, misfit anti-heroes in Joe’s squad and finding herself on assignment in Kuwait, befriending the daughter of a high-ranking terrorist. As Joe explains to Cruz, if her cover is blown, there is no saving her. She’ll be on her own. (Morgan Freeman doesn’t appear in the pilot, but reports indicate he’ll be playing the Secretary of State.)
“Special Ops: Lioness” has all the makings of a crackling good military spy thriller. In the pilot episode alone, we not only learn about Cruz’s back story, we see Joe’s uneasy and unconventional personal life when she returns to the comfortable home she shares with her husband Neil (Dave Annable) and their two children. They clearly love one another, but they also have an understanding: When Joe is on a mission and away for long stretches of time, they can see other people. Like everything else in Joe’s life, it’s complicated.
And now Cruz has also joined that world, and there’s no turning back.
