Twisted Metal review: Anthony Mackie is the saving grace of a messy post-apocalyptic comedy

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.

Which feeds into one of the weirdest things about Peacock’s Twisted Metal: how frequently it tries to be a genuine adaptation of the original Twisted Metal—a video game series that, for all its hooks into its audience’s collective adolescences, hasn’t had a new installment in 11 years. Sometimes this unearned reverence manifests as just an Easter egg here or there—a bit of “Calypso is real” graffiti, referencing the antagonist from the game series, or a sign name-dropping an iconic level from fan-favorite Twisted Metal: Black. But it also impacts both character and plots, deforming them to be more obviously reference-y, to the delight of … someone? Which is to say that your current reviewer has probably played a hundred or so hours of Twisted Metal across the course of his life—is, for sure, in the target demographic here—and never saw anything that rated more than a bemused “Huh!”

The end result is a profoundly messy show, but not one without its joys. Mackie and Beatriz really do make for a winning comedy duo, mining laughs out of their characters’ endless bickering. And the show’s hyper-focus on a world that ended at a very precise moment in 2002 culture pays a lot of dividends across its 10-episode run (including an unexpected appearance by an inanimate Pistachio Disguisey that got a legitimate laugh out of us). Most shocking of all, Twisted Metal occasionally reveals itself as a show with some genuine ideas powering it, forcing new images and concepts into the overcrowded post-apocalyptic genre. (Stone’s “D.M.V. as an execution site” evil base is one notable example, as is “The Convoy,” a society made up entirely of truckers who never, ever stop their rigs, Snowpiercer-style. Ridiculous, but the right kind of ridiculous.)

More often than you’d like, though, Twisted Metal loses control of the wheel, slamming into the guardrails of goofiness on one side and maudlin melodrama on the other. The show’s plot, especially, is total nonsense, sending Mackie racing across a decent chunk of the country with a ticking clock that never seems to meaningfully tick. There are ideas, images, and jokes worth seeing here, to be sure. But it’s a long trek to get to them.

Twisted Metal premieres July 27 on Peacock