CAST: Chris Pratt · James Reece ; Constance Wu · Taylor Kitsch , Riley Keough, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Jai Courtney, JD Pardo, LaMonica Garrett, Patrick Schwarzenegger

DIRECTED BY: Antoine Fuqua, Ellen Kuras

We see Reese at a military funeral, slamming a Navy emblem angrily into a casket. Two weeks earlier, at Incirlik Air Base, Reece and his Navy SEAL team are given orders to flush out and kill a notorious arms dealer “Chemical Kahani.” The team reaches the Mediterranean shoreline of Syria and enters the labyrinthine crypt leading to where Kahani is hiding out. In the process, they find a trip wire connected to explosives. But once they get around that, they get ambushed, with multiple SEALs and support soldiers getting hit. Then, in a panic, one SEAL, Donny Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger) sets off the trip wire while running.

At least that’s the official word. As he recovers at Incirlik, Reese has to not only deal with invasive dreams about the incident but the fact that 12 of his men died in the operation. When he’s told by investigators that Mitchell set off the trip wire, Reese swears that’s not how it went. He’s also approached by a reporter, Kate Buranek (Constance Wu), who pushes him to leak some info on the botched operation. He tells her that neither him or “Boozer” Vickers (Jared Shaw), who is sitting next to him and is the only other team member to live through the operation, won’t talk.

He comes home to California, and as he’s catching up with his wife Lauren (Riley Keough) and daughter Lucy (Arlo Mertz), and realizes that he has holes in his memory. Then, after he’s called to Boozer’s apartment, where apparently shot himself in the head with his team pistol, Reece is told that Boozer wasn’t in Incirlik when Reece thought he was. He has his best friend and former SEAL Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch) start to look into the ambush, because he truly thinks that their unit was a victim of advanced deep fake technology. He’s so convinced, he reaches out to Buranek to figure out whether Boozer was with him or not.

His suspicions are somewhat affirmed when he’s attacked by masked assassins while he’s in an MRI tube. But then the situation gets worse from there.

Based on the book by Jack Carr, if you have been watching  Jack Ryan, Homeland and Reacher, the Prime Algo will get you .

Our beef with the hook is that it comes a little too late. But when it does, it hooks you for the rest of the binge.

The start of the hook is when Reece is speculating to Ben about how Boozer couldn’t possibly have killed himself with the team 9mm, because he hated using it instead of his much bigger .45, then the improbable MRI attack that seemingly comes out of nowhere. By the time we get to the end of the first episode, it feels more like a full-on conspiracy show and less of an examination of someone who questions his loyalty to a military that’s not telling him the truth, despite the gaps in his memory and obvious PTSD. You doubt Reece too.

Pratt and Wu out of their elements here. Sure, Pratt hasn’t been in a pure comedy since his Parks and Rec days, but most of his action roles have not been nearly as grim as what we see here. Wu is supposed to be a hard-nosed, activist reporter, but whenever she’s on screen we just want to see more of her.

Most hard hitting scene: When Reece is running away after a shoot out in downtown SFO, the FBI Officer chasing him tries to use his Dad’s creds to get Reece to give up and surrender. He asks Reece – what would your Dad think of you if he knew what you were doing?

Says Reece, ” He’s say It’d be a mistake to push a man to violence, if violence is what he has dedicated his life to perfecting.”