Strike Back: Season 1 (Cinemax)

Product Description

A high-octane, globe-spanning thriller with storylines ripped from today’s headlines, Strike Back is a one-hour drama series that focuses on two members of a top-secret anti-terrorist organization known as Section 20: Michael Stonebridge, a British sergeant in the ultra secret Section 20 anti-terrorist team, and Damien Scott, a Delta Forces operative who was disgraced and discharged on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Amazon.com

When American cable viewers tuned in to the premiere Cinemax offering Strike Back in 2011, they were actually seeing the second series of a British TV show based on a popular novel by a former British military officer. Known in the United Kingdom as Strike Back: Project Dawn, the 10-part series follows the covert exploits of Section 20, a secret subgroup of Britain's MI6 intelligence agency. The series has a plot arc that extends across the entire season (carried over from the original six-episode first British series), but the hour-long installments are also divided into five two-part stories that stand alone in the larger storyline. The overlying plot concerns a brilliant Armageddon-obsessed terrorist named Latif (Jimi Mistry), who is the target of Section 20's global manhunt. The two field agents on Latif's tail are Michael Stonebridge (Philip Winchester), of the British Special Air Services, and Damien Scott (Sullivan Stapleton), a disgraced American Special Forces alpha dog now working as a contract officer for Section 20. While they follow leads and stay one step behind Latif, Stonebridge and Scott buddy-buddy their way from New Delhi to South Africa, Darfur, Kosovo, Chechnya, and Budapest, leaving a trail of bullet-riddled corpses and sexually satisfied women strewn in their wake. Strike Back unabashedly revels in extreme bloody violence and gratuitous soft porn (they don't call it "Skinemax" for nothing), along with the jargon-heavy tradecraft of realistic counterterrorism dramas like 24, Homeland, and The Unit. The writing is often very good, with a ripped-from-the-headlines vibe that makes for taut narrative structure and plenty of suspenseful action. (The first two episodes portray the siege of a hotel based on the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai.) Stonebridge and Scott trade a breathless stream of foul-mouthed one-liners and spy lingo between the prolific and often shockingly offhanded violence. Their standing orders seem to be shoot first, kill the people who have the information they need, and damn the innocent civilians who get between their automatic weapons and the terrorists, warlords, drug kingpins, and arms dealers in their sights. The duo have a knack for blundering into situations and blowing their covers for the sake of gun-blazing action rather than quiet intelligence gathering, which certainly packs the show with exciting fun. Despite the superfluous displays of flesh and absurdly high body count, Strike Back is a cracking serial thriller with high-level production standards that are consistently first-rate. The actors in Section 20's support staff make for a fine ensemble, and their crosscut operations maintain a credible level of detail in the multiple story threads that wind through the entire series. Including Jimi Mistry, there is an impressive cast of guest stars that add gravitas even as the mayhem threatens to devolve into the cartoonish. Liam Cunningham plays a psychopathic ex-IRA terrorist hungry for bio-weapons in one two-parter, and Iain Glen is a morally conflicted arms dealer in another. The show does sustain a high level of integrity; key characters are dispatched as the episodes count down to the ultimate face-off with Latif and the way is cleared for another season. While Cinemax continues the search for its golden show, Strike Back is a perfectly fine diversion. --Ted Fry