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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
7
Mixed:
14
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
iJul 24, 2023
Season 1 Review:
De Oliveira might not be in their [Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman's] league yet, but if her performance here is anything to go by, she will be. Her Manuelos is a combination of barely suppressed rage and eagerness to please, and she’s very handy with a frying pan – as a weapon rather than an item of cookware. She also conveys an air of emotional vulnerability. You’re rooting for her within 90 seconds of her introduction.
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Jul 24, 2023
Season 1 Review:
The first episode serves as a mostly successful setup, but much of what the show will become remains top secret. There's also a question of how this budget will be spread around; is the opening scene with all its helicopters and explosions a sign of what's to come, or just a big show to get viewers instantly hooked? I don't know, but the intel we do have on the rest of the series says it has some promise.
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The TelegraphJul 24, 2023
Season 1 Review:
The show is good at what it does. The military sequences are well directed, the camaraderie of the team is well drawn, and each episode leaves you keen to see what happens next. It’s an effective action thriller, albeit one that only goes skin deep – there is none of Homeland’s complexity and the dialogue is cheesy in a Top Gun sort of way.
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ColliderJul 21, 2023
Jul 21, 2023
Season 1 Review:
What can be said about “Special Ops” from its first 42 minutes is that it looks like an awful lot of other counterterrorism thrillers, with a visceral punch to its action and a ticky-tacky, backlot feel whenever it moves in close on its Middle Eastern settings. Saldana registers stoic magnetism, as usual, as the overseer of the operation.
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Jul 24, 2023
Season 1 Review:
This one shrugs off any misgivings about its characters’ mission with the reasoning that “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” Which sounds good coming out of a soldier’s mouth, as long as you don’t think too hard about how that line of thinking might play out in practice. But that seems to be par for the course for a series enamored more of impossible ideals than actual human nature or lived experience.
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RogerEbert.comJul 21, 2023
Season 1 Review:
Here’s hoping the show gets more complicated after its opening hour (and finally shows us Morgan Freeman, one of the biggest names attached to the show but who remains absent from the premiere). Otherwise, it’s hard to see what this does for people outside the dopamine hits craved by folks who play a little too much “Modern Warfare.”
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The Daily BeastJul 21, 2023
Season 1 Review:
A military thriller minus any thrills, originality, or nuance, it seems destined to follow the path of [Sheridan’s] prior Paramount+ hits: a show that features lots of talented people wasting their time on second-rate material targeted directly at red-state viewers.
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Jul 21, 2023
Season 1 Review:
It is perhaps predictable that the Sheridan take on pop feminism would weaponize women’s liberation in service of the military industrial complex. After all, that rhetorical sleight of hand is as much a cliché as the rest of “Lioness,” which shows the strain of a single writer cranking out scripts for each of his half-dozen shows on air. “Lioness” may be a first for its creator in some respects, but in others, it’s more of the same.
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