Twisted Metal review: Peacock's video-game adaptation misses the mark
Some of the biggest success stories of recent pop culture have been blends of seemingly contradictory tones. Just this past weekend, Barbie lit the box office on fire with its funny (but also sad), dark (but plastered in pastels) fusion of a singular artistic vision with a corporate IP product. Going back a little further, the biggest superhero success story of the past decade outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been the Deadpool movies, which achieved an unexpectedly massive fanbase by putting ironic genre commentary alongside entertaining superhero action.
Given these achievements, there's an obvious temptation for modern genre storytellers to combine apparently disparate elements in hopes of creating something better than the sum of its parts. But Peacock's new series Twisted Metal proves that pulling off such a magic trick is actually a lot harder than it looks.
Based on the PlayStation video game series of the same name, Twisted Metal stars Anthony Mackie as John Doe, a so-called "milkman" who drives his trusty car through the post-apocalyptic wasteland, scavenging food and medicine that he then sells at a premium to various strongholds of surviving humans. The other survivors he encounters range from the friendly (like Stephanie Beatriz's Quiet) to the fascist (Thomas Haden Church's Agent Stone), but there's also a big guy in a clown mask. That would be franchise mascot Sweet Tooth, physically portrayed by wrestler Samoa Joe but voiced by Will Arnett.
This isn't quite an adaptation of the video games' storyline, because Twisted Metal was never a plot-first franchise. It's a demolition derby where players select from a gallery of colorful characters (such as the aforementioned Sweet Tooth and Agent Stone) to drive around a dangerous track shooting missiles at the other players until only one is left standing. That's not a whole lot to base a TV show on. Although 2023 has been a banner year for video game screen adaptations (a genre previously considered unworkable), Twisted Metal lacks both the iconic characters of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the meaty, resonant storyline of The Last of Us.
To fill that vacuum, screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have supplied lots of obnoxious jokes and mean personalities. That's basically what they brought to the Deadpool movies, but Twisted Metal is missing some of the key ingredients that made that goofy superhero work so well. For one thing, Mackie is just not as funny as studios and producers seem to think he is. Remember when Marvel greenlit The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (still the worst of the direct-to-Disney+ MCU shows) because of one kinda-funny quip between Mackie and Sebastian Stan in a previous movie? This feels like that, and demonstrates that Ryan Reynolds wrapping his brutal put-downs in smiling movie-star charisma is harder than it seems.
Plus, Deadpool had a decade's worth of superhero culture to riff on. When it comes to post-apocalyptic car action, Twisted Metal basically only has Mad Max: Fury Road as a touchpoint. It's worth remembering that Fury Road's humor (such as it is) mostly consists of having a character named "the Doof Warrior" shredding a flaming guitar in the middle of the action. Twisted Metal, by contrast, opts for hitting you with loads of Reddit-esque made-up swears like "dickpunch."
As both protagonist and narrator of Twisted Metal, Mackie talks a lot, especially early on. Mostly he just says "oh s---!" over and over, in order to tell you that what's happening onscreen is supposed to be awesome without actually doing the work of building out a world or constructing cool chase scenes. Meanwhile, Beatriz is an actually funny comedic actress, but as a character named "Quiet" she barely speaks, while Mackie's milkman yaps on and on.
There's also something off about the Sweet Tooth character. Arnett is obviously a talented voice actor (here at EW we remain big fans of his work on both BoJack Horseman and The Lego Batman Movie) but this combination feels unnecessary. Splitting up the physical and vocal acting worked for Brendan Fraser and Riley Shanahan on Doom Patrol, but Robotman is a character who deeply feels the division between his human mind and robotic body (plus, in retrospect, the role now feels like the warm-up for Fraser's Oscar-winning performance as a man trapped in his own body). Whatever humor there is to be had in playing Sweet Tooth's jovial personality against his menacing physicality should be accomplished in the writing, and yet he has some of the most insufferable dialogue.
Rounding out the cast, fans of the Doughboys podcast will be happy to see Mike Mitchell here, but unfortunately much of his screen time is taken up with lame jabs at his weight. There are a few too many fat jokes overall: In the first episode, Mackie notes that his supply load includes insulin (which would surely be an in-demand product after the apocalypse, a thorny survival problem for many people) and then cracks "life must be good if the diabetes is that bad!" It's indicative of a show that hardly ever lets anything sit (whether a joke or a serious moment) before immediately undercutting it with ineffective humor. Because of this, it's hard to take the show seriously when it goes for straight sentimentality — as in the fourth episode, which shows Mackie and Beatriz's characters sharing their favorite movie memories in a derelict theater while another survivor says goodbye to her ailing grandmother.
Like so many modern streaming shows, Twisted Metal feels like it would work way better as a movie than a miniseries. Tricky as this tonal balance is, it's a lot easier to maintain for two hours than 10. Plus, it takes forever to get to the big car chase! Several early episodes go by with hardly any time spent in a car, which seems to go against the whole point of adapting a demolition derby video game. Grade: C-
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