Netflix’s low-rent, high-concept movie of the week stars Anthony Mackie as an android super soldier who is more human than his new partner.
Have you ever watched “Training Day” and wondered how cool it would be if, 15 minutes after the movie started, Denzel Washington took off his shirt to reveal that he was actually a semitranslucent android super soldier with the strength of an Terminator and the emotional reach of a Team B Avenger? Of course you are – you are only human. But screenwriters Rowan Athale and Rob Yescombe have taken it upon themselves to make that dream a reality, and the result of their efforts is a sci-fi piece from the “Netflix movie of the week” that grapples with big questions about the future of modern war through a concept that borders dangerously close to “Chappie”.
It is rare to see something that dares to present an entire Cirque du Soleil performance on the narrow tightrope between the smart and the silly; Rare enough that it is tempting to forgive “Outside the Wire” for how he frantically struggles to keep his balance. The film’s paradoxical obsession with preserving humanity from war is compelling enough to keep things moving, even when everything around it looks tasteless and gray, and the stupidity of the whole enterprise – encouraged by the ingenious direction of Mikael Håfström (” Escape Plan “) – is consistent in a way that makes you want to focus on the pulpy extrapolation of the Asimovian concepts film, rather than how it drops them to the floor.
You want to take advantage of the evocative camera head design of robotic soldiers who support the American military in viewing the 2036 film and ignore the fact that they are called “Gumps” (presumably because they are stupid, subject to endless abuse and always appearing at critical moments in history). You want to know that mecha Anthony Mackie has found a role that makes good use of his programmatic charm and ignore that scene where he likens the human sex to “putting meat in a taco”.
The most sophisticated android in the world was apparently programmed by an intern at Barstool Sports. Perhaps another zero at the end of the film’s budget or a clearer final draft of the script would have been enough to push “Outside the Wire” into more solid territory, but the gravity of his low-rent approach proves too intense for him to succeed. off the ground.
Snowfall actor Damson Idris stars as Lieutenant Thomas Harp, a drone pilot who kills America’s enemies from the Nevada container, where he works some 8,000 miles away. Sometimes friendlies get in the way. The film begins with a monotonous and somber prelude that shows Harp dealing with an impasse in the conflict zone that engulfed Central Europe; disobeying a direct order, our hero makes the call to drop a bomb that kills two American soldiers to save 38 others. It’s the kind of math that never makes sense, and even if Harp was right to pull the trigger, the distance between his actions and their consequences are enough for anyone in your position to feel like they’re just playing a video game.
Then Harp is redirected straight into the middle of the struggle so that he can relearn the value of human life (or what the army calls “the authority of experience”). Irony of ironies: he is assigned to partner with Leo (Mackie), a robot so convincing that only the camp commander knows he is not made of flesh and blood. Together, this strange couple will venture into the war zone beyond the base and stop an enigmatic madman named Viktor Koval (Pilou Asbæk) from launching the entire arsenal of dormant nuclear weapons from Russia’s 20th century. The mission becomes FUBAR in a hurry, and our incompatible heroes are forced to negotiate all sorts of moral equivalences as they advance through the generic ruins of Budapest flooded by CGI (the Gump effects look tactile and fantastic, but everything else seems just half step above the Snapchat filter).
In theory, Harp and Leo make an attractive pair. The first is a human who thinks like a robot, and the last is a robot that is turned off in the heartbeat it will never have. Despite Leo’s tendency to switch from civilian to “King Kong has nothing to do with me!” at any time, he loves life’s most analogous pleasures. He loves books, maps and vinyl records, and even has a crush on the British (“Little Joe” actress Emily Beecham) who runs an orphanage in the heart of the war zone; the old rusty robots that stay in your garden and play with children are an inspired touch that evokes images from Miyazaki’s early films.
There is a clever irony in the idea of a drone pilot being guided into a conflict area by someone who is essentially a drone, and these two characters would be strong counterparts in a Kirk / Spock way were it not for the fact that each of their conversations boils down to Harp saying something cheeky and Leo barking at him about how humans aren’t emotional enough to make sensible decisions in a war – after all, it was human indifference that started the fight. “Training Day” worked with raw arrogance and willpower, but that movie had Denzel Washington and sunny Los Angeles at its disposal. “Outside the Wire” has Anthony Mackie slowing down his residual “Altered Carbon” vibrations as he closes in on each line of the cooked dialogue as if he is afraid to choke on them.
On the bright side, he’s an even more capable action star here than on any of his Marvel outings so far. The action sequences in the film tend to have little motivation and a lot of shouting, but Mackie stands out in a series of one-on-one fight scenes that allow him to flex Leo’s inhuman muscles. Viktor Koval is absent for a long time to be more than a McGuffin in this story, but his eventual confrontation with Leo is a good fight. Elsewhere, generic shootings are redeemed for moments that reflect humanity’s need to clean up its own mess. An especially tense moment seems under control until the Gumps make the programmatic call to open fire and Harp is forced to run for his life as civilians fall around him.
Still, the fact remains that humanity is our greatest weapon, and removing it from the fight would only make the fight worse. Leo may have been programmed to present some sort of compromise as part of the military’s gradual move towards purely artificial soldiers, but there is some mystery as to what he wants from work – a mystery that is repeatedly revealed and reversed during the ridiculous climax of the film, which leads to a revelation that probably didn’t need to be as artificial as it looks when it ambushes us in the final minutes.
Resolving as a sincere plea to keep the human face of war at a time when technology can increasingly do our dirty work for us, “Outside the Wire” puts its metal thumb on the scale to say that getting people out of combat it’s just going to make us a lot more apathetic to those who stay; that the only cure for war is for people to actually be able to face the horror of fighting it. The tedious work that Håfström does here only leaves you with the regret that this war was no longer fun to watch.
Grade: C
“Outside the Wire” is now being streamed by Netflix.
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