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. .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
J**Z
Fun with Strike Back
One of the best put together storyline and action shows I have ever seen, I think it's about the only thing I watch on Cinemax besides Banshee. While Stonebridge and Scott work on the very edges of legality (by good guy standards) this show operates in the grey area of ambivalent heroes versus the monsters of the world. They also have great but not over the top "guy" banter that is very funny if you catch it in context. Seasons 2 & 3 were by far the best and I suppose it had to end before it got too diluted as a story, but seasons 1 & 4 are still better than anything on network TV or most cable. Although it is just a television show the author Chris Ryan is the real deal (SAS for 10 years) and would have a better idea of the seedy underworld that evil exists in and the lengths the good guys have to go to for even the smallest amount of justice. On a less serious note, it's a great drinking game show - drink every time Scott says any variation of "f@&k me" and every time Stonebridge says " move, move" . The show didn't need the gratuitous sex to be great, but I guess that builds Damien Scott's character. Speaking of characters, they were easy to believably invest in, and the show was not afraid to kill them off, so be prepared. Philip Winchester (Stonebridge) is in a now cancelled show "The Player", with Wesley Snipes, which I hope Netflix or Amazon can pick up and Sullivan "Sully" Stapleton (Scott) is from 300 Rise of an Empire fame as Themistocles and is now FBI agent Kurt Weller in Blindspot also a pretty good show.
J**S
Rad show. Watch all of the 1st episode... and it quickly grows on you.
Great show and I now wish season 3 was free, and not 24 bucks. Good show to watch when one may be bored, sick... or free to binge watch as I did. I watched season 1&2 over a period of 2 days, and it definitely made me forget about the pain I was feeling from a surgery I had just had.I think both men and women should be able to enjoy watching the show...as it has plenty of great stunts, military realism, violence, T&A, solid plot lines, and wonderfully created/developed characters to boot.I may just bite the bullet and order season 3, as I'm very tempted & still recovering from my surgery. I regret not having started watching this show on Cinemax (or Skin-emax) prior...when I fell in love with Banshee(which is also on Cinemax), and in the beginning of Banshee they always had all these trailers or stunt scenes, showing how Strike Back actors pulled off the stunts, gun scenes, and explosions as they did, and I never took it serious, and just saw it as "another one of those types of shows".Both Strike Back, and Banshee are a great shows. I'm very impressed that Cinemax has really taken to creating shows like these and love these two shows, and a definite fan of both.Banshee is also on Prime, and I believe only the 1st season is free, but it's definitely a must watch show...if shows like these are for you?Give the 1st episode a shot, and see if the characters and story lines grow on you...as they surely did for me.
M**.
Solid Entertainment for Fans of Sex, International Espionage, Special Forces Operations, & British TV Drama on Testosterone
---The entertaining BBC/CinemaX series starts "good" and gets better with each episode: much like the actors' accents.According to IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base), the "British" lead actor is played by an American and the American "Section 20" operator is played by an Australian: yet, they seem perfectly cast for their respective roles.If the Amazon rating system allowed for 1/2 stars I'd rate this season 4.5 Stars or somewhere between "I Like It" and "I Love It" as the writing (at times) works a little to hard to be "cool" :and, some of the military tactics/character choices seem questionable and inconsistent (e.g. expressly declaring not to shoot at a helicopter because it has a nuclear warhead on board in one episode but then shooting at a truck with the same type of nuclear warhead tied to the flatbed in a different episode).For Fans of "The Unit", "MI-5", and international special forces type film/TV, and soft-core, this series may be described as Seal Team Six meets "MI-5" with an injection of testosterone and plot thickening, story-line essential, soft-core scenes in nearly every episode.If this carried a movie rating, it would most definitely be "NC-17" for explicit sex scenes and excessive violence.Military tactics rank near "The Unit" and seem about as realistic as TV drama permits given the notion that TV stars can neither be encumbered nor can they have their faces or pecs obstructed by standard military tactical gear - especially helmets (except for the pilot episode).If you can overlook some of the minor inconsistencies, graphic sex and violence, and a penchant for dropping F-bombs during chase and combat scenes, you may find this series entertaining -- when in the mood.
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