Review: 'Yellowstone' creator's 'Lioness' misses the point of a good spy thriller
This isn't "Zero Dark Thirty." This isn't even "American Sniper." This is "Dallas" in Syria.
"Yellowstone" creator Taylor Sheridan has a Midas touch for Paramount; seemingly every TV show he touches turns into ratings gold. But while he has had great success with spinoffs of the Kevin Costner Western including "1923" and"1883," his forays outside that genre have been creatively impotent. His military/spy thriller "Special Ops: Lioness" (Paramount+, streaming Sundays, ★★ out of four) is not much better than his outright laughable mobster-in-Middle-America Sylvester Stallone vehicle, "Tulsa King."
Yes, stars like Stallone − and in the case of "Lioness" Zoe Saldana, Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman − may flock to Sheridan's ever-expanding roster of gritty TV shows, but there isn't always something compelling behind their famous faces. "Lioness" is a confusing, dull and unappealing take on the war on terror, which has a lot more in common with soaps like ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" or NBC's "This Is Us" than espionage fare like Amazon's "Jack Ryan" or "The Terminal List." It fundamentally misunderstands what people like about war stories; we're not here for torture porn and misanthropy. We're here for inspiration, determination, grit, and the triumph of the American dream over enemies. It is not enough to outfit white men with beards in camouflage vests and automatic weapons; there has to be a story behind all the gunshots and drone strikes.
"Lioness" can't decide if it wants to tell a story about a Marine turned operative Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), her jaded handler Joe (Saldana), that handler's sordid family life, the bureaucratic suits who run the armed forces and CIA (represented by Kidman, Freeman and "House of Cards" alum Michael Kelly) or bro-mantic boys story about a military unit in hard circumstances. The first half of the premiere episode is an ad for the Marines, in which Cruz escapes an abusive relationship and minimum-wage burger-flipping job by enlisting, and quickly beats all the boys in training to become Joe's next undercover agent in the "Lioness" program. That program inserts female operatives in the paths of the wives, daughters and girlfriends of terrorists, hoping that by befriending the woman they can find and hit the man with a UAV.
One would think that since the title of the show includes the words "special ops" and "lioness," most of the series would follow Cruz on her undercover mission, but that appears to be an afterthought. Instead, we spend oodles of time with Joe's family, including her pediatrician husband (Dave Annabel) and her jerk of a teenage daughter (Hannah Love Lanier). What scenes of that husband telling random parents their 6-year-old has terminal brain cancer or that teenager ripping the hair out of a soccer opponent are doing in a show that opens with a drone strike in Syria is anyone's guess. In addition to being emotionally manipulative and extraneous, scenes of Joe's home life are just boring, reflecting no real information back about her character or motivations.
There are a few moments when the camera rightly turns on Cruz on the job in risky situations, where the show remembers it is meant to be about something as high stakes as a war. There is palpable danger and intrigue. Just for a second or two. But there are also too many scenes where Joe has a special ops team kidnap and torture Cruz to train her for a possible abduction later, or Joe forces Cruz to strip to ensure she has no mission-endangering tattoos. There are too many bar fights between random divisions of the military and not enough reasons to remember the names of any of the characters on screen. After two episodes, you wouldn't be faulted for not knowing what a single person was called.
Between "Yellowstone," its spinoffs and films like "Hell or High Water," it's clear that Sheridan knows how to write engaging, addictive drama. With "Lioness," he's trying to do too many things at once for any one of them to be successful. There might have been an interesting show about the cost of black ops work on raising a family, or a different one about the toll of espionage on soldiers, or still the one "Lioness" is pretending to be about infiltrating social circles of terrorists. But not this show.
This show is just a sandy-colored mess.
Our interview with Zoe SaldanaWhy she turned down Taylor Sheridan and 'Special Ops: Lioness,' then changed her mind
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