OUTSIDE THE WIRE (2021) FILM REVIEW

**

15, 115 Mins

Self-serious Sci-Fi actioner cries out for a flash of humour and *wink wink* absurdity.

Given the title, you could be forgiven for expecting ‘Outside the Wire’ (2021) to be a documentary about the making of David Simon’s landmark HBO TV series. But no. Mikael Hafstrom’s film is a slightly self-serious actioner about an android who teams up with a drone pilot to stop a nuclear attack. Anthony Mackie and Damson Idris have serviceable hot n’ cold chemistry and Emily Beecham is a sizzlin’ hot supervillainess, but this stupendously silly Sci-Fi really cries out for a flash of humour and *wink wink* absurdity.

The year is 2036 and a Ukrainian civil war leads the US to deploy peacekeeping forces in the region. During one of the operations, a team of US Marines and robotic soldiers known as “Gumps” are ambushed. After disobeying a direct order, drone pilot Harp (Damson Idris) unleashes a Hellfire missile during a drone strike against a suspect enemy launcher; killing two Marines, but saving the other 38. As a consequence of his actions, Harp, having never served in a war zone before, is sent to the US base of operations in Ukraine where he is assigned to the eccentric Captain Leo (Anthony Mackie). Secretly, Leo is a hugely advanced and experimental android super-soldier pretending to be a gruff army officer.

Harp and Leo are sent on a mission to prevent a pro-Russian terrorist with the Putinesque name of Victor Koval (‘Borgen’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ Pilou Asbaek) from controlling a Cold War-era network of nuclear missile silos while pretending to be delivering vaccines to a refugee camp…

The concept of artificial intelligence officers and super-soldiers has dominated Sci-Fi for decades, right from the days of Isaac Asimov’s ‘I, Robot’ (1950) in literature and right down to 80s action movies like the ‘Terminator’ (1984-) and ‘Robocop’ (1987-) franchises. The genre has constantly toyed with the dangers of technological advancements and the idea that we are investing too much faith in the high-tech, only for them to turn on us one day.

‘Outside the Wire’ therefore has a potentially philosophical and highly intriguing premise. Unfortunately the movie squanders it in its setup which pitches Mackie’s android as little more than a shooting buddy to Idris’ drone pilot. Just think about that premise - an android pretending to be human teams up with a drone pilot to stop a nuclear attack and see if you don’t laugh-out-loud at its preposterousness.

‘Outside the Wire’ might have worked better had it acknowledged how silly it is and made a running gag or ironic aside about the absurdity of the premise. But no. Director Hafstrom seems determined to take this movie 1 million percent seriously and I just didn’t.

There is perhaps some humour to be had in the ying-yang bromance between Idris and Mackie. It’s a very brotherly bond they have and the best scenes are when they are driving (which they do constantly) and exchanging dialogue about the differences between human and android. This adds an interesting fish out of water-style dynamic to the central pairing.

The show is easily stolen, however, by Brit redhead on the block Emily Beecham who flashes her legs as a super-sexy supervillainess. This is a very different role to previously for the Emma Stone lookalike from her quasi-shaved head turn in the snorefest ‘Little Joe’ (2020) or as the slightly pointless girlfriend of ‘Sulphur and White’ (2020).

Beecham plays Sofiya - a resistance leader-turned-bad and she has a great kick-ass scene where she beats up a gang of brutes with her thighs. It’s great to see a really good female baddie in a mainstream motion picture in the wake of Kristen Wiig’s fabulous turn as Cheetah in ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ (2020).

Beecham perhaps brings the movie that inchling of fun it needs to be even half-successful as a Netflix-of-the-week action movie. But the jokes are missing elsewhere and the whole thing just reeks of self-seriousness.

There was so much room here for interesting Sci-Fi ideas about modern warfare and technological overload. This movie just needed to be a little funnier, quirkier and weirder to pull it off…

‘Outside the Wire’ is on Netflix now.

A version of this article appears in LeftLion and can be found at:
https://www.leftlion.co.uk/read/2021/january/outside-the-wire-review/
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