“20 years ago, the world fell to shit.”
So begins Peacock’s adaptation of Twisted Metal, the video game franchise that saw numerous, pimped out vehicles striving to obliterate each other for some reason or another. I personally was a big fan of the game back in the day with many a night wasted as I played Twisted Metal: World Tour to death while surrounded by more than my fair share of pizza boxes and beer cans, but even I have to admit that dredging up this forgotten franchise to slap it on the screen probably wouldn’t have happened without the surprising dash of quality video games movies have recently acquired.
That means that not only has Twisted Metal got itself a decent budget to screw around with and recognizable faces such as Anthony Mackie, Stephanie Beatriz, Neve Campbell and Thomas Haden Church, it’s also got writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on board, delivering the usual self-aware japery you’d expect from the guys who penned Deadpool and Zombieland. Buckle up peeps, this ride might get a tad bumpy…
It’s the not too distant future and thanks to the disastrous effects of a Y2K style bug strutting everything down, the world promptly fell into a constant state of feral chaos because, as our hero John Doe puts it: “Not having easily accessible porn freaked people the fuck out.”. John Doe is what is known as a Milkman, a delivery driver who braves the bullet torn, criminal-filled wasteland as he passes packages from settlement to settlement, dodging psychos, scavengers and the occasional RPG launched in his direction as he burns rubber from A to B.
However, despite his continuously sunny disposition, John pines for a family and something approaching a normal life – well, as normal as you’d get living in a murderous dystopia – so when Raven, the Chief Operations Officer for New San Francisco, demands a meeting, out hero is intrigued.
The job is simple – retrieve a mysterious package from New Chicago and in return John will be given full citizenship and a chance to make a real life for himself. However, as he excitedly heads off on what undoubtedly be a ridiculously dangerous journey, we see that Raven isn’t all as soft edges and motherhood as she first appeared.
Elsewhere, a couple of sibling bandits named Loud and Quiet, who tried to jack John’s ride a couple of days earlier, has fallen foul of Agent Stone, a sadistic cop who has tasked himself with clearing up the lawless wasteland with genocidal intent. After forcing Loud into taking his own life and branding Quiet, the mute survivor vows vengence on Stone and sees John’s ride as a good way to get it – however, in the shadow of Las Vegas, neither may prevail if the monstrous Sweet Tooth manages to get his mits on them first.
While certainly a polished affair that sees plenty of screen hinges cars, whizzing rockets and more sarcastic banter than you can wave a Ryan Reynolds at, the pilot episode of Twisted Metal is a noticably uneven ride. Fast, furious and pedal to the metal all the way, the show will no doubt benefit from the brief, 29 minute running time of each episode, but everything roars by as such a speed, its tough to give a rat’s ass about anything you are witnessing, no matter how fun and colourful it may first appear. Maybe a slightly longer first episode might have brought us into this deranged new world a little smoother, but while the similarly anarchic games saw a group of diverse lunatics going all in with a ultra violent demotion derby, Twisted Metal: the show instead a plot that’s not unlike Chuck Jones running smack-bang into Mad Max: Fury Road.
It’s fun, but it also has all the depth of a puddle in July with the show fourth-walling itself into oblivion before the show’s even started thanks to the sight of a copy of Twisted Metal on the Playstation landing on John’s windscreen in one if the most obvious examples of meta humour in recent memory. Of course, it gets a confused, WTF look from Mackie’s endlessly perky hero and while I’ve always really enjoyed the actor’s brash style, I’m not sure that Deadpool-style quips prove to be the best fit for him. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’s certainly fun to be around, but on more than a few occasions the actor seems a little out of his depth giving broad reactions to absurd situations like after a hose down by New San Fran personnel ends with Doe getting his butt spritzed with a daintly cloud of perfume.
Everyone else settles into their equally exaggerated roles fairly well; Neve Campbell plays the same type as ruthless boss-bitch Joan Allen played in the Death Race remake (faking a husband an child is a particularly cold touch), while Thomas Haden Church’s Stone is your typical end-of-civilisation style fascist, but it’s Beatriz’s mute bandit who holds the attention the most simply because she’s under playing the craziness around her. Of course, it’s early days yet and with ten episodes in all, there’s plenty of time for everyone to settle.
However, while the rest of the episode goes all-in on a cartoonish tone that favours gory slapstick over nuanced world building (If everything is in short supply, how is everyone replacing their car-mounted rocket launchers?), you can’t help but wonder if all the jokey death and destruction won’t prove to be a little irritating as the season progresses. The short episodes certainly help contain the zaniness much in the same way it managed to focus the lunatic occurences of Ash Vs Evil Dead (a personal favorite of mine) and it’s tremendous fun to watch a hapless goon get a gatling gun point blank up the anus while John marvels at how well his new windscreen wipers clean off blood spatter, but all the goofy action ultimately carries all the weight and drama of one of those bloody Tom & Jerry cartoon where they’re actually friends. Still, there’s still ice cream van driving, clown-faced barbarian, Sweet Tooth still to come, so hopefully the show can zero in better on the particular brand of crazy it’s trying to aim at…
Still, as overly glib as Twisted Metal is, it’s still a noisily diverting thirty minutes that doesn’t overstay its welcome (just), but compared to the grim majesty of The Last Of Us, this jocular collection of automobiles and ammunition can’t help but feel a little too lightweight.
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