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    In ‘Twisted Metal’ Series, Killer Clowns Come With Class Commentary

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    Peacock’s new show indulges in the same ultraviolence as the video game that inspired it. But this time it has a message about the haves and the have-nots.When Stephanie Beatriz likes a script she enjoys reading it aloud at home to get a better feel for the character and story. She warmed up quickly to “Twisted Metal,” the new Peacock mayhem machine based on the popular PlayStation game series that first burned rubber in 1995. But as she turned the pages, encountering psycho clowns, murderous religious cults, cannibalism and other manner of good times, she had to pause. Her 8-month-old daughter was in the room.In a June video interview she recalled what she told her husband: “I’m going to take a break and stop because I’m not sure that this is great for her subconscious.”Her concern was well-founded. Premiering July 27, “Twisted Metal” is nothing if not extreme. Fast and profane, it is fueled by what “A Clockwork Orange” once called a bit of the old ultraviolence. It is blood-soaked, bullet-ridden and chaotic. In one early scene, two men sit in massive tubs, waiting to be cooked and served. One of them is sprinkled with a generous portion of lemon pepper spice as a human foot dangles from a line; Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” (“Ooh, baby, I like it raw”) blares on the soundtrack.Starring Anthony Mackie as John Doe, a wiz behind the wheel hired to deliver a mystery package across a hazardous, postapocalyptic America, and Beatriz as Quiet, his no-nonsense, vengeance-minded passenger, “Twisted Metal” stakes out a sometimes-queasy intersection between terror and glee. It’s a little like “Mad Max” on laughing gas.“It’s a very weird apocalypse,” Marc Forman, an executive producer, said. “It’s crawling with cannibals and weird cults. What’s great is that you never know what’s around the corner.”The series stars Mackie as an ace wheelman on a cross-country mission and Beatriz as his vengeful passenger.Skip Bolen/PeacockThere’s very little that is old fashioned about “Twisted Metal,” yet it has a fair amount of nostalgia in the tank — for both the pre-apocalyptic world, and for an earlier age of gaming. The story is set in the wake of a hazily defined, world-destroying event that occurred in 2002, freezing culture as the characters know it in that year. An evil interrogator uses the late ’90s Europop earworm “Barbie Girl” to torture his prisoners.As Mackie’s John drives his beat-up 2002 Subaru through a dilapidated shopping mall, he’s excited to see the remnants of a Foot Locker (he grabs some kicks as he races by). A Twisted Metal game cartridge falls onto his windshield; he looks at it quizzically.Mackie, 44, recalled playing the earliest versions of Twisted Metal. “I remember it just being destruction,” he said in a June phone interview as he sat, ironically, in traffic. “The game was just demolition derby, and I loved it, but it was impossible to play. You couldn’t control the cars — you were just flying past each other, shooting missiles and hoping they hit.”The playing experience advanced, along with the rest of the gaming industry, through subsequent iterations. Now “Twisted Metal” is just the latest TV series hoping to translate gaming popularity to small-screen success, following in the footsteps of series like Netflix’s “The Witcher” and HBO’s abundantly Emmy-nominated hit “The Last of Us.”In gaming circles, “Twisted Metal” belongs to the genre of “vehicular combat.” The game isn’t big on narrative. The series’s creative team, including the showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith and the writer-executive producers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (both writers on the “Deadpool” movies), were charged with expanding the game’s world to the scale of a TV show — to take it beyond, in Mackie’s words, “just being destruction.” (PlayStation Productions and its corporate cousin Sony Pictures Television produced the series along with Universal Television.)Sweet Tooth, a macabre killer clown, is played by the body of the wrestler Joe Seanoa paired with the voice of Will Arnett.PeacockSome characters exist in both Twisted Metal mediums, including the psychotic clown Sweet Tooth, perhaps the show’s most macabre creation. A bare-chested hulk with a leering clown mask — he is played by the body of the wrestler Joe Seanoa paired with the voice of the actor Will Arnett — Sweet Tooth controls what is left of Las Vegas, driving what appears to be a refurbished ice cream truck and wielding a machete that he uses to slash open all comers.At one point he assembles a ragtag army of outcasts to do his bidding, giving him a literal insane clown posse. But Sweet Tooth has one thing in common with John and Quiet: an enmity for Agent Stone (a platinum-dyed Thomas Haden Church), a petty tyrant who essentially runs the country.Somehow, amid all the mayhem, “Twisted Metal” finds room for contemporary class consciousness. John has been tasked with a cross-country trip, from New San Francisco to New Chicago and back, with the promise of a cozy life by the bay if he succeeds. New San Francisco is a walled urban paradise where the swells dwell, while throughout most of the country, it’s a mad scramble to survive. Inside the wall you can eat dinner. Outside, you might be dinner.“The metaphors abound,” Beatriz (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) said. “It is silly, it is violent, it is funny. But so much of the show is about who has and who doesn’t. There’s an argument to be made that there’s a certain kind of cannibalism happening now, within our society, at all times.”“The metaphors abound,” Beatriz said, but the series is also a chaotic blood bath.Cedric Angeles for The New York TimesBut fans of the Twisted Metal game needn’t worry that their beloved bedlam has gone highbrow. The series’s bread and butter remains people shooting and slicing each other to pieces, often while driving cars equipped to do the same. This is car culture at the end of the world, a land of last resorts. So it seems appropriate that John drives not a souped-up sports car but a true beater, modified to handle the wear and tear of the apocalypse. John’s true love in “Twisted Metal” isn’t Quiet, but Evelyn — or, as her license plate reads, EV3L1N.Mackie can relate. After his breakout performance in “We Are Marshall,” from 2006, he was able to purchase his dream car: a 1964 ½ Ford Mustang (as the earliest Mustang models are known by enthusiasts). He’s been tinkering with it ever since. The car’s name is Marshall.“Me and Marshall are always cruising and enjoying our time together,“ Mackie said. “Before I had my sons, Marshall was like my best friend. Some people talk to their plants, some people talk to their cats. I would talk to my car.”Beatriz had a slightly different automotive coming-of-age. She was acting in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when she started thinking of moving to Los Angeles. One problem: She didn’t know how to drive, and a car is a must in L.A. So she learned from a friend and fellow Shakespearean, Catherine E. Coulson, perhaps best known as the Log Lady in “Twin Peaks.” Coulson would take Beatriz around Ashland, Ore., where the festival was located, in her Prius, a far more fanciful image than any you will see in “Twisted Metal.”Beatriz’s maiden voyages with the Log Lady have given way to faster adventures: She was grand marshal for the Indianapolis 500 in May. As part of the gig she got to ride shotgun in an Indy car before the race, hitting speeds of 190 miles per hour. “Could have gone faster, would’ve been great,” she said.All that fun, and not a killer clown in sight. More

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      ‘The Woman in the Window’ Review: Don’t You Be My Neighbor

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      Amy Adams plays a reclusive psychologist who witnesses a crime in a glossy new Netflix thriller.“The Woman in the Window” evokes two emotional states widely associated with the Covid-19 pandemic: real estate envy and the condition of melancholy drift that some psychologists call languishing. The resonance is purely accidental, since this adaptation of a 2018 novel by J.A. Finn, directed by Joe Wright (“Atonement”), was originally slated for theatrical release in 2019. To make a long story short, it fell through the cracks of the Fox-Disney merger and landed at Netflix, where it feels curiously at home. More

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      ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Recap: Lost in America

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      The often thrilling first episode of this Disney+ series is likely to satisfy Marvel fans who’ve invested years in keeping track of these characters and their many, many problems.‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Season 1, Episode 1Although the title of the latest Marvel Comics television series is “The Falcon and the Winter Solder,” the show is defined by another superhero entirely: the absent Captain America. Both the high-flying military operative Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and the brainwashed, ageless assassin Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) spent time as sidekicks to the original Captain, Steve Rogers, who at the end of the 2019 Marvel movie “Avengers: Endgame” retired from the hero business, leaving his old friends without a partner — or a mission. The question haunting Sam and Bucky now is, “What’s next?”That’s also a good question for the bosses at the streaming service Disney+, who are coming off the recent success of “WandaVision,” their first big post-“Endgame” Marvel TV project. The highly assured, often thrilling first episode of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is different from “WandaVision” — in that it’s an international action-adventure and not a surreal riff on classic sitcoms. But Episode 1 is likely to satisfy Marvel fans who’ve invested years in keeping track of these characters and their many, many problems.Directed by Kari Skogland and written by the show’s creator Malcolm Spellman, this first episode opens with a rousing aerial chase sequence, reminiscent of some of the better set pieces in Disney+’s “The Mandalorian.” The Falcon and his U.S. Army handler Lt. Torres (Danny Ramirez) pursue enemy agents through the hills, deserts and canyons of North Africa, trying to nab their target before they fly into Libyan airspace and touch off an international incident.Skogland and Spellman provide minimal setup to what’s going on, beyond loosely identifying the bad guys: a band of criminals known as “the L.A.F.,” who’ve kidnapped an Army officer. Most of this show’s first 10 minutes is pure visceral excitement, as we watching Sam in his high-tech flying outfit, dodging bullets and blades, attacking dudes in jumbo jets and helicopters and diving after them when they bail out in glider suits. It is super-heroics at their niftiest, culminating in a daring midair rescue.Sam then gets another moment of triumph before he returns to his post-Captain America existential crisis. While sitting in a Tunisian cafe, Sam talks (in perfect Arabic) to a stranger who thanks him for helping to restore reality, after “the blip” that sent half of the sentient creatures in the universe into limbo for five long years. Like “WandaVision,” “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” isn’t just set in a world still recovering from the trauma depicted in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Endgame.” It’s also directly about how both the superpowered and the ordinary have been coping with all the loss and the confusion.A big case in point for Sam: After his covert mission in Africa ends, he returns to his family home in Louisiana, where his sister Sarah (Adepero Oduye) has been struggling to turn their parents’ beat-up old fishing boat into a viable business. Sam hopes that his fame and prestige as an Avenger will help swing them a bank loan. But like billions of other people who disappeared in the blip, he hasn’t earned any income for five years, which — perhaps coupled with some old-fashioned institutional racism — means the Wilson siblings don’t get help.Bucky has even bigger troubles. He spent a half-century as a mind-controlled killer, before finally regaining consciousness not long before being blipped away. Since returning, he’s been trying to make amends for the harm he caused, hoping to push back some of the nightmarish memories that torment him at night. But he’s finding that even being kind can be complicated.Bucky doesn’t see as much action this week as Sam does. He’s at the center of one big fight sequence, in a flashback to an old mission from his international assassin days. Instead, most of his story line involves him going on his first date in about 80 years, at the urging of an elderly Asian-American neighbor. The twist? Bucky murdered that neighbor’s son, after the kid witnessed the hit depicted in the flashback.Sebastian Stan in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”Marvel StudiosMuch of this episode is about the sense of disconnection and alienation these two title heroes feel — not just because they were absent from Earth for a half-decade, but because they have weird jobs. Bucky, who fought in World War II before he was captured by the enemy and turned into a monster, ruefully notes at one point that he probably hasn’t danced with a girl “since 1943.” Sam is a wizard with the advanced Stark technology he works with every day, but he fumbles when it comes to getting his family’s boat motor cranking. When Bucky’s therapist tries to ease his troubled mind by reminding him, “You’re free,” he mutters, “To do what?”By the end of this initial 45-minute chapter, the series’s plot begins to kick in, on two fronts. Early in the episode, Torres tells Sam he’s on the trail of an underground revolutionary group called “the Flag Smashers,” who think life was better during the blip years. Torres locates their leader in Switzerland — sporting a creepy mask with a red handprint across the face — and gets beaten brutally for his troubles. Meanwhile, Sam — who was offered the job of Captain America at the end of “Endgame” by Steve Rogers himself — is rudely surprised when the shield he donated to the Smithsonian is retrieved by the U.S. government and handed to a new guy.We’ll surely learn more about this new Cap (played by Wyatt Russell) next week, seeing whether he lives up to the idealistic comment Sam makes when he donates the shield: “Symbols are nothing without the men and women who give them meaning.” Clearly, in between the white-knuckle action sequences, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is going to leave space for some thoughtful rumination on what the American dream means in a world where, as Sam also says, “Every time things get better for one group, they get worse for another.”For now though, he appears to be a living embodiment of that trade-off. When he opted out of becoming Captain America himself, Sam may have thought he could control the legacy of his old friend, by letting his iconography pass into history. Instead he’s finding that whatever he doesn’t take, someone else will — and maybe at his own expense.The All-Winners SquadThe Smithsonian’s Captain America exhibit includes what looks to be the Jack Kirby-drawn cover from 1941’s “Captain America Comics” #1.Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe surely perked up when Don Cheadle appeared as James “Rhodey” Rhodes, counseling Sam at the Smithsonian. But this episode also featured a more deep-cut M.C.U. character in the kickboxing mercenary Georges “the Leaper” Batroc (Georges St-Pierre), who appeared as the main villain in the opening action sequence of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and serves a similar function here, as the man behind the kidnapping the Falcon foils.Speaking of parallels to “The Winter Soldier,” in that movie Captain America nonchalantly jumps out of the back of a plane, and the Falcon does the same thing at the start of this episode … but with a little more flair. More

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      ‘Outside the Wire’ Review: At War With the Robots

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Outside the Wire’ Review: At War With the RobotsThis Netflix film starring Anthony Mackie is neither curious nor bold in the ways it depicts a sentient robotic revolt.Damson Idris, left, and Anthony Mackie in “Outside the Wire.”Credit…Jonathan Prime/NetflixJan. 15, 2021, 11:12 a.m. ETOutside the WireDirected by Mikael HåfströmAction, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-FiR1h 54mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The director Mikael Hafstrom’s “Outside the Wire,” the latest Netflix combat film set in an exotic location, offers empty-calorie action in a less than fulfilling, Cold War-inspired robotic revolt narrative. The film’s redundant intertitles — several characters repeat the same information later — explain the outbreak of a civil war taking place in the year 2036 in Eastern Europe. U.S. troops, with the assistance of robotic soldiers called Gumps, serve as peacekeepers against the region’s ruthless criminal warlord Viktor Koval (Pilou Asbaek). Harp (Damson Idris), a dispassionate drone pilot, is ordered to the war zone as punishment after his cold calculation led to the deaths of two Marines. Paired with a top-secret android, Leo (Anthony Mackie), as his superior officer, he embarks on a mission to stop Koval from obtaining nuclear weapons.Like several sentient-robot films (“The Terminator,” “Ex Machina”), “Outside the Wire” presents an android-as-slave metaphor, except this time with a Black actor. While the Gumps are physically and verbally abused by their human comrades, Leo is equally dismissed as “not one of us.” And Harp, a Black soldier without the discipline to say “sir” to his superiors, is assigned to what amounts to a robot overseer in Leo. While this metaphor serves as the thematic backbone to Leo and Harp’s mission, the incurious script by Rowan Athale and Rob Yescombe leaves the conventional subject threadbare.[embedded content]The cinematographer Michael Bonvillain maps the shaky-camera style he used on “Cloverfield” — what Roger Ebert at the time called “Queasy-Cam”— onto the firefights in “Outside the Wire” to bewildering results. The film’s opening siege, for instance, depicting a platoon’s battle to recover a fallen comrade trapped in a crossfire, is spatially uncertain. Grainy establishing shots of the skirmish offer little visual information other than its location on an expressway. Without viewers knowing where, and at whom, the soldiers are firing, the onscreen action is rendered indecipherable. Mackie’s quirky performance — Leo ends every order to Harp with an uncomfortable smile — is likewise baffling. Under the guise of looming worldwide destruction, the film builds to an overwrought finish involving unsurprising betrayal, and even more undramatic twists. “Outside the Wire” is a futuristic war movie that lacks imagination in the present.Outside the WireRated R for extreme robot-on-robot violence. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More