Burn Notice

In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, BBC1. Available on the iPlayer
In the US: Fridays, 10pm, Cinemax. Starts October 19

Action heroines are few and far enough between, particularly on TV, that when a writer creates a female-centric action drama, such as Hunted, he or she has to decide to do one of two things: to be gender-neutral and ignore the fact it’s a woman doing the fighting or to be gender aware and tailor the writing accordingly.

Both ways can work – look at either Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Haywire – but both involve peril. You can be gender neutral like Burn Notice, but then you end up with Gabrielle Anwar, who hasn’t eaten food since 2005, regularly beating 200lb ex-special forces guys in hand-to-hand fights.

Nope, not happening.

Or you can be gender-aware like Missing, tailor your action scenes to the fact your lead is a tad smaller and weaker than the steroided-up 6’5″ male characters, but have have pretty much every single plot item happen because the lead is a woman, and in Missing‘s case, a mother.

Hunted, which features Home and Away star Melissa George as a former army intelligence officer who joins private sector company Byzantium Security – this decade’s Saracen Systems – to carry on spying but for the highest bidder, goes for the secret third approach: the hybrid option, in which pretty much everything happens because George is a woman, but the action scenes remain gender-blind, even though George is built like a Littlewoods catalogue model.

Hunted‘s implementation is probably the least satisfying of all the options (Haywire – more on that later – is secret option four: how to do it properly), results in George mooning about lovers, moving in with the bad guys to look after their kids and getting pregnant by a colleague. Yet somehow, despite the hand of Frank Spotnitz being behind the plotting and dialogue, both of which have the power to make your brain rot in the manly mirror universe of Sky/Cinemax’s Strike Back, Hunted is actually surprisingly okay: nothing extraordinary, nothing too smart and in many ways quite stupid, but with enough flair and action that it’s a passable enough way to spend your time.

Here’s a trailer:

Continue reading “Review: Hunted 1×1 (BBC1/Cinemax)”