‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Review: Zoe Saldaña and Nicole Kidman in Taylor Sheridan’s Simplistic Paramount+ Series

There’s a moment late in Barbie when a character lays out all the contradictory demands placed on women: to be strong but not too strong, pretty but not too vain, ambitious but never aggressive, and on and on and on. It’s an inconceivable standard for anyone to meet, even a perky toy doll, and the film’s conclusion is that the only way to live with them is by letting go of the pressure to try.

But the thing about cultural scripts is that they’re damnably hard to shake. There are always going to be people trying to thread that needle, no matter how clearly impossible it is. And so we get stuff like Paramount+’s Special Ops: Lioness, a series that tries so hard to meet some broadly palatable ideal that it largely forgets to do anything interesting.

The new non-Yellowstone Taylor Sheridan thriller centers on Lioness, an elite team led by CIA agent Joe (Zoe Saldaña) that infiltrates groups of terrorists by sending undercover operatives to ingratiate themselves with their wives and daughters. The latest recruit is Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), a strong female character in every stereotypical sense. For starters, the literal one: In Marine Corps basic training, she hits pull-up counts and running speeds that put her in the 99th percentile — “on the men‘s scale,” her superiors marvel, lest we presume she’s only good for a girl. Additionally, she’s the stoic silent type. She rarely gets emotional, even when reflecting on her own tragic backstory, and is prone to neither comedy nor frivolity.

At the same time, she’s conventionally attractive — as Special Ops: Lioness takes pains to emphasize with a scene that has her strip naked for the flimsiest of plot reasons. And before we get to know her as a soldier, we see her as a damsel in distress. While fleeing an abusive boyfriend so one-dimensionally awful he might as well be twirling a mustache, she runs straight into a Marine Corps recruitment center, where she’s so impressed by the officer for scaring him off that she enlists almost on the spot. Tough but also vulnerable, pretty in a casual way, talented enough to attract notice but never so crass as to actually pursue career advancement: check, check and check, never mind if it leaves Cruz feeling less like a human than a jumble of focus-group-approved traits.

In fairness, some flatness isn’t necessarily unusual for a series just starting out, and critics like myself were only sent the first episode of Special Ops: Lioness. If its moral universe seems too black-and-white to be interesting — America good, terrorists bad, war-torn Middle Eastern countries perpetually tinted yellow — we can hope future storylines will add some welcome shades of gray. If its characters seem overly simple now, perhaps we’ll get more depth as we get to know them better. If nothing else, we can surely look forward to more from Nicole Kidman, who appears only briefly as Joe’s CIA boss, or Morgan Freeman, who does not show up in the pilot at all.

And even from here, Special Ops: Lioness isn’t all bad. De Oliveira imbues Cruz with enough gravitas to suggest hidden depths that the script has so far declined to plumb. She’s liveliest when bristling under the authority of Saldaña’s cryptic, slightly sardonic Joe. Meanwhile, Saldaña draws a poignant contrast between Joe’s icy professional demeanor and her tender private one, as in a visit to the husband (Dave Annable) and kids who’ve become nearly strangers to her after so many months sequestered in distant, classified locations.

But too much of the hour is marked by indifference, incuriosity and a lack of imagination. Its requisite action scenes (John Hillcoat directed the pilot) are unmemorable at best and downright confusing at worst. They’re there because you’d expect them from a military spy thriller, not because anyone had any particular ideas about how to make them look cool or exciting. Its dialogue is boilerplate. A bonding scene between Cruz and her new teammates should be an opportunity to showcase their personalities. Instead, we get boring clichés like “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t get drunk with me,” or “I’m a fucking Marine, what’d you expect?”

Its script seems to be constructed with the assumption that most of the audience will only be half-watching while scrolling Facebook on their phones anyway. Consumed that way, it’s probably less noticeable that (for instance) the timeline seems to skip forward at an erratic pace — certain events that seem like they should be weeks apart turn out to have transpired over days, while entire months fly by without so much as an onscreen caption to acknowledge the passing of time. Actually pay attention, like I did for this review, and you might find yourself asking questions like “Why is Cruz, a character we’re made to understand is really good at pull-ups and not very interested in people, singled out as a top recruit for a mission that calls on her ability to befriend and manipulate a shopaholic socialite?”

But there is one aspect of Special Ops: Lioness that shines through clear as day no matter how much or how little of your focus you’ve directed toward it, and that is its reverence for the U.S. Marine Corps. To call it an hourlong recruitment ad would be understating just how heavy-handed it is. It’s not enough that an officer saves Cruz from her abusive ex. Later, she recounts what happened to another officer so that he can underline the show’s theme in more explicit terms: “We are the strong. We protect the weak. We are merciless in that endeavor.” A more thoughtful drama might hang on the last part of that statement, and springboard from there into difficult conversations about how far that mercilessness goes.

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. In a weekend when even Barbie’s being forced to confront the gap between fantasy and reality, it’s Special Ops: Lioness that comes out looking like it’s populated by plastic action figures.