Twisted Metal review: Anthony Mackie is the saving grace of a messy post-apocalyptic comedy
The actor stars in Peacock's video-game adaptation as "John Doe," an amnesiac courier facing down a cartoonishly violent vision of broken America
We’ll give Peacock’s adaptation of the hit ’90s video-game series Twisted Metal this: It’s energetic enough, with a tone that veers all over the road with the same energy as its (surprisingly infrequent, given the source material) car-based battles. Simultaneously a pitch-black post-apocalyptic comedy and a high-speed action thriller and an occasionally somber Walking Dead-esque meditation on man’s inhumanity, Twisted Metal (out July 27) can never quite pick a lane.
The show is lucky, then, to have Anthony Mackie in the driver’s seat. As amnesiac courier John Doe, Mackie does heroic work trying to keep the show’s disparate impulses from ripping it apart, playing a fast-talking smart-ass with a decent amount of depth beneath his quick-flying quips. Partnered up with Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz, as a would-be carjacker who keeps intruding on his “one last job,” Mackie makes for exactly the lead this show needs, playing to its eschatological absurdities and its occasional feints toward deeper meaning.
Infused with a soundtrack culled straight from the nostalgia mines of the late ’90s and early 2000s—ironic, really, that this is the recent pop-culture offering to make effective use of Aqua’s 1997 hit “Barbie Girl”—Twisted Metal spills a whole truckload of quirk over its violent vision of a world in ruins. At its best, the show uses its humor to heighten and reflect on its horror, raising it to a point of blood-soaked satire. A flashback to Beatriz’s life in sunny Orange County—where over-fed and comfortable suburbanites collect the fingers and ears of “disobedient” indentured servants as grisly fashion accessories—is legitimately stomach-turning, as is a character origin story that plays like a disturbing inversion of the opening sequence of last summer’s Nope.
Sometimes, though, the show just throws Jason Mantzoukas in a Father Guido Sarducci costume and expects that to be enough. As a rule, Twisted Metal is at its best the closer it hews to Mackie and at its worst as it sidetracks into the more aggressively cartoonish characters who make up it supporting cast. Thomas Haden Church acquits himself well enough as the tyrannical Agent Stone, a former mall cop attempting to impose murderous “justice” on a broken world. But the show’s fixation on Sweet Tooth, the paint-by-numbers murderclown who served as the mascot of the original game series, is genuinely unfortunate. Played physically by wrestler Samoa Joe, and voiced with dispiriting listlessness by Will Arnett, the character is neither as funny, nor as scary, as the show seems to think he is. He’s just there, sucking up screen time, because you presumably can’t have a Twisted Metal TV show without Sweet Tooth.