Strike Back Review: Times on-Line

Let me preface this review with my long-time expectation that Strike Back would probably receive loads of knee jerk liberal cynicism upon it's debut.  IMO, the majority of newspaper reporters (on both sides of the Atlantic) have been marinating for far too long in an unrealistic liberal attitude toward the realities of today's world.  And therefore they almost deny the need (through insinuated ridicule) for western nations to defend their innocent populations.  They also tend to entertain the liberal misconception that the warrior class must always be perceived by an 'intelligent' mind...cough,cough,..as masculine brutes who rarely have sensitive moments in life.  That said here's one of their opinions--do you agree with it?
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From Times Online May 5, 2010

Last Night’s TV: Chris Ryan's Strike BackAndrew Billen
(Steve Brown)

Richard Armitage as John Porter and Orla Brady as Katie Dartmouth
Chris Ryan’s Strike Back, Sky1

A publicity picture for Chris Ryan’s Strike Back shows the series’ stars — Richard Armitage, automatic in one arm, Orla Brady, holding his other — running from a pursuant Land Rover and two helicopters. It is an interesting image in two ways. Although ideally there should be a few explosions going off, it is really a film poster for the sort of action movie you only ever see at the cinema or on one of the less elevated film channels. It is not the sort of television that television usually makes (which is why, back in the Eighties, the video tape recorder and Blockbusters had to be invented). In making television out of airport rather than literary fiction, the Cold Feet producer Andy Harries challenges TV’s Jane Austen-reading executives — not least to place who the former British soldier-turned-novelist Chris Ryan actually is.

The publicity image is inaccurate, however, which is the other reason it interests me. For by the point in yesterday’s two-part opener that Armitage and Brady were on the run, Brady’s character, a TV reporter kidnapped by extremists in Iraq, has had a hand chopped off. There is a grittiness, almost a realism, to this piece that is not entirely expected by those of us who equate action movies with Die Hard. Another example would be Armitage’s insertion of a condom-wrapped penknife up his bottom by the side of a desert road. You don’t get that on 24.

Armitage, whose face is mostly something of a blank and is easily out-acted by his foil Andrew Lincoln, plays the burnt-out SAS man, John Porter, “reactivated” to rescue Brady’s Katie Dartmouth. He is as action hero as you could want but what moved me was his portrayal of Porter before he got his mojo reactivated: a security guard with low-self esteem and a wife and daughter who resent his absences to the point of wishing him dead. When he goes for a job, all his machismo confidence deserts him and he reads out his CV from a note held in a shaking hand. It is one of several grace notes in Jed Mercurio’s script. True, it features lines such as “Come one step further and I’ll take you down” but it also finds room for a dig at Porter’s “mission-limiting” fixation on sex. “In layman’s terms, you needed a shag,” says Jodhi May as the lieutenant supervising his comeback. Mercurio wrote Bodies, which, frankly, is much more my cup of social realist tea but he does not talk down to his new audience here. I hope it loved Strike Back.