‘Twisted Metal’ Ruins a Popular Video Game With Juvenile, Unbearable Mayhem
Six months after The Last of Us proved that video games can make for compelling screen drama, Twisted Metal arrives to confirm those old suspicions about the two medium’s fundamental incompatibility. An aggressively unfunny adaptation of a one-dimensional decades-old PlayStation franchise that few still care about, Peacock’s R-rated action-comedy breaks down from the start and never recovers. Peddling lame gags and lamer action, it’s a clunky trip not worth taking.
As a game, Twisted Metal was a gonzo demolition derby between various wannabe-outrageous vehicles outfitted with deadly weapons, and its primary appeal (if one existed) was allowing friends to battle each other in multiplayer. Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Michael Johnathan Smith’s 10-part half-hour series (premiering July 27) naturally provides no such thrills, instead falling back on post-apocalyptic clichés and dreadfully exaggerated humor and performances to tell a tale of one hero’s journey to traverse an American wasteland in order to achieve his dream. The best that can be said about the show is that it captures the over-the-top early-2000s-style “twizted” tone of its source material. Unfortunately, that attitude turns out to be borderline unbearable.
Twisted Metal’s protagonist is John Doe (Anthony Mackie), who—per his name—has no memory of his past and longs for the family he only knows via a burned-up photo. John is a futuristic courier known as a “milkman” (as denoted by his “got milk?” bumper sticker) who drives from one walled-off city to another in his beloved 2002 Subaru named EV3L1N, cracking jokes with a gleefulness that doesn’t translate to actual laughs. Mackie mugs with a total lack of inhibition in an attempt to turn John into the coolest cartoon in this comic world, his smile as big and goofy as his one-liners are groan-worthy. The effort is so strained that it instantly grates, and the result is that the entire series pivots around a smug, superficial character who’d be better off—to use a term that eventually refers to his souped-up ride—as roadkill.