Netflix’s Outside The Wire is Training Day meets The Terminator, but much less fun than either
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“King Kong ain’t got shit on me!” boasts Denzel Washington’s corrupt cop toward the end of Training Day. That wasn’t actually true, but it apparently sparked a high-concept idea in someone’s mind, since Outside The Wire answers the unasked question, “Say, what if a callow rookie got partnered with the Terminator?” Set in 2036, the film imagines a vague Eastern European civil war (let’s not potentially anger anyone by naming actual countries!) in which the United States plays an equally unspecified peacekeeping role. After disobeying a direct order—firing a missile despite being told to stand down—drone pilot Thomas Harp (Damson Idris) gets reassigned to combat duty, reporting to one Captain Leo (Anthony Mackie). Leo initially comes across as a standard-issue military badass, but Harp’s jaw hits the ground when his superior removes his shirt in the locker room to reveal a translucent torso packed with chips and wires. Turns out Leo is a heavily classified “fourth generation biotech” prototype, human in appearance but programmed to make decisions based purely upon utility. In Harp, who sacrificed two U.S. soldiers via a strike that may have saved 38 others, Leo believe he’s found the ideal subordinate for a particularly dangerous mission.
The nature of that mission gets revealed bit by bit over the course of two fairly monotonous hours, during which Harp predictably discovers that war looks quite different on the ground than it did from the safety and comfort of a trailer in Nevada, thousands of miles away. Those fuzzy shapes on his monitor were real people, and now he’s one of them. Interspersed among the blunt moralism are battle sequences that, while passably exciting, mostly serve to illustrate just how ludicrously superhuman the average action-movie hero is. Despite taking place just 15 years from now, Outside The Wire features robot soldiers that resemble Robocop’s ED-209 crossed with the Battlestar Galactica reboot’s non-humanoid Cylons. Oddly, though, the film opts to make Leo only perhaps 15% stronger, faster, and tougher than everyone else on screen… which may be realistic, but also means that he performs pretty much the same amazing physical feats that we’ve seen a zillion times before, from the likes of John Wick and Jason Bourne. The movie’s single coolest moment involves a minor character (played by Emily Beecham, star of Little Joe) who somehow disarms and beats up a dude using only her coat, but is not subsequently revealed to likewise be a robot.
Mackie’s performance, for better and worse, is anything but robotic. He plays more or less the same charismatic wiseacre he usually does, interpreting Leo as a machine that’s every bit as uniquely expressive as is any human being. That injects some welcome levity into what’s generally a flat, dour adventure, directed by Sweden’s Mikael Håfström with little of the old-school verve that he brought to Escape Plan. Part of the problem is that Outside The Wire, like every movie about a drone pilot, feels compelled to punish the concept of warfare by remote control; without getting into spoiler territory, let’s just say that this impulse fits less than comfortably with the third-act revelation of Leo’s true motives, clumsily grafting an ethical dilemma onto an otherwise straightforward morality play.
What’s more, screenwriters Rowan Athale and Rob Yescombe get unforgivably lazy at times—Harp’s only on hand to save the day at the end, for example, because someone with every reason to kill him (and whom we’ve previously seen casually execute a perceived traitor to the cause) inexplicably allows him to just walk away. This is the kind of half-assed film in which Leo, reciting Harp’s credentials from memory, notes that his protégé has logged 56,000 flight hours, and apparently nobody, whether in the script phase or on set or over months of post-production, thought to calculate that this would require flying eight hours a day, every day, for more than 19 years. (Damson Idris is 29 years old.) Like many Netflix productions, Outside The Wire assumes you’re barely paying attention.
22 Comments
Feels like a tactic with these lower tier, Netflix flicks; hire an A-list star to head what amounts to a C or D-list script and production: this; Project Power; Extraction; The Old Guard (though I get the impression this one was lauded?) etc. etc.
The Old Guard really wasn’t that bad. It had a weird soundtrack and they clearly blew a lot of the budget casting Theron, but otherwise it was nice concept that was decently executed. Couldn’t agree with you more on Extraction though.
It wasn’t that Old Guard was bad as such, just as you say the budget was blown on that A-list star so the rest of the film looked so cheap & boring. When even boilerplate TV productions look cinematic, The Old Guard felt like a throwback to some hitherto pilot from the late 90s that never got picked up.
sounds like the netflix house style of ‘very expensive (though still cheap looking), almost good’ is in full swing.
That movie where marines fight ghosts with laser cannons was pretty adequate
Fish-fosh. Bunkum and honeydew. An egregious tartufle!
So, basically, a “Holmes & Yoyo” reboot ?
“This is the kind of half-assed film in which Leo, reciting Harp’s credentials from memory, notes that his protégé has logged 56,000 flight hours, and apparently nobody, whether in the script phase or on set or over months of post-production, thought to calculate that this would require flying eight hours a day, every day, for more than 19 years.”ARRRRRRRGH. This kind of shit is so fucking lazy. The worst example I know is at the beginning of Den of Thieves, where it lays out a (phony) number of bank robberies in LA every year, then breaks it down by day and hour, and none of the breakdowns even line up with each other! (I don’t remember the figures, but it’s like saying “There are 10,000 bank robberies a year. That’s 50 a day! Which means 5 every hour!”) They can’t even be bothered to do real math on their fake number, just insulting.
Recently rewatched Contagion for obvious reasons and they did this too, stating that the average person touches their face 2-3k times per day, which would basically mean your hand was constantly on your face for all waking hours.
Maybe it’s a sly critique of people using mean over median — it’s actually a normal number but a couple Handy McFacertons who can’t stop grabbing their mugs throw off the average.
Still not as lazy as when The Blacklist claimed that the Plague (Y. pestis) was a virus.
Wait a second – you mean *real* netflix original productions are total shit?
Yeah, I am definitely watching this stupid crap.
Stupid crap is my bread and butter bro
“This is the kind of half-assed film in which Leo, reciting Harp’s credentials from memory, notes that his protégé has logged 56,000 flight hours, and apparently nobody, whether in the script phase or on set or over months of post-production, thought to calculate that this would require flying eight hours a day, every day, for more than 19 years.”I love that you actually did do the math.
Lmao Netflix
Has Netflix produced a good film or tv show? They all seem either bad or in the case of tv, something that people talk about it but are pretty bland.
SIDEBAR: I maintain that Training Day is a more effective quasi-“adaptation” of Heart of Darkness than Apocalypse Now was.
I like the cut of your jib. Totally agree on that point.
The 56,000 hour remark brought me here, I just had to search and see who else thought that was so over the top as 12 hrs per day on 365 days a year is 12+ yrs. Watching this as a background movie while I do some work and that line had me running to the remote to rewind and confirm they actually said that….lmao.
Forget Netflix, pedo pushing fools. Why does anyone subscribe to them anymore?
A take too late for anyone who even cares, but they do say it’s a civil war in the Ukraine propped up by the US and Russia. They even specifically call out the callow motivations of both countries. The film isn’t anywhere as deep as it thinks, but before it fully devolves into a shallow action film at the very point it should be slowing down, it actually explores interesting topics.