Outside the Wire features solid clues and sparse moments of captivating action, but is overwhelmed with an ineffective trick and poorly served by an underdone script. Set in the near future, the film engages the viewer in a civil war in the Eastern Bloc, where the US is playing an irregular referee using robot soldiers (called “Gumps”) to patrol a battle-ravaged Nobody’s Land. It is this premise, and, of course, the early revelation that Captain Leo of Anthony Mackie is a classified next-generation cyborg who makes Outside the Wire a science fiction film. But the more you watch the movie and marvel at the money that Netflix is investing in an almost always disposable offer so that it can be a “science fiction” movie, the more you realize that it didn’t have to be a sci-fi movie at all . The message could have been easily passed on to today’s humans.So if you go a little deeper into the rabbit hole, you may find that the moral dilemmas in this film are not exactly new and that it may not even need to be done. And that perhaps the sci-fi skin of Outside the Wire was just a brilliant excuse to retell a “war is bad” morality tale that has been explored countless times. So despite the performances, some fun parts of the Super Soldier action and a (complicated) “twist”, everything sounds empty. Like, unfortunately, most Netflix movies, it looks like a project that only three quarters carried out. Although, to be fair, the ads for this film run with “From the studio that brought Extraction and The Old Guard …” and these two films are better than this one. As mentioned, the MCU’s Mackie plays a legal and confident android who is more or less allowed to run his own operations in the midst of chaos – with his top priority being to capture warlord Victor Koval (Pilou Asbæk of GoT). Mackie, as usual, is an immensely charismatic performer, able to make the most awkward lines of dialogue and a seemingly endless sequence of exposure seem vital. And while we don’t know what awaits his Marvel character, Sam Wilson, in the upcoming Falcon and Winter Soldier series, it’s a real explosion to see Mackie fight like a badass at Cap and / or Bucky level.Entering the second in this bizarre “comrade cop” dynamic is Lieutenant Thomas Harp of Damson Idris, a drone pilot sent to the front as a punishment for going against direct orders and launching an attack that kills two Marines (but saves more than two dozen others). It is here, with Harp, that the film seems unable to decide where to land in its decision of the “greater good”. Harp is painted as a cold soldier who begins to see the pain his drone attacks caused once immersed in the hell of real combat (the dichotomy is that Mackie’s android is more emotional and human than Harp), but the film too makes it clear, several times, to say that Harp was right to do what he did.
After a while, complicated messages and an overdose of esoteric robotics protocol pile up in a movie that you can’t fully enjoy on a level of pure action. Leo and Harp get out of control, “out of the wire” and enter the war zone to prevent Koval from getting his hands on nuclear weapons and everything is profoundly less interesting than it should be. Things are briefly able to take off whenever Mackie is able to tumult like a one-man army, but principally director Mikael Håfström (Escape Plan, The Rite) has created a very expensive and beautiful model that can go arm in arm with others Netflix offers bloated and bland.
