Mr. Movie: So-so “Outside the Wire” shows future of combat
Outside the Wire
As you know, computers are growing ever smarter. Most can diagnose and repair themselves when something is amiss. So it’s not much of a stretch to assume that sometime in the very near future artificial intelligence will improve to the point where it starts looking and acting like people.
In the case of “Outside the Wire,” that date is 2036.
That date is a bit of a stretch but so is most sci-fi involving such entities. In this case, 2036 has civil war broken out in Eastern Europe. It is centered in Ukraine and U.S. forces are there as peacekeepers.
Robots called gumps do a lot of the fighting.
Damson Idris (TV’s “Snowfall”) is Lieutenant Thomas Harp. He’s a drone operator who screws up so badly that he gets assigned to the war front. There he is put under the authority of Captain Leo. He heads intelligence for a unit. No one knows that Leo is also an artificial life form.
Like most machines in this kind of movie, Leo is brilliant. He’s also a cyborg with blitz-lightening reflexes and almost super-powered strength.
Leo is convinced that a dangerous war lord is looking at grabbing nuclear weapons housed in former Soviet Union silos. He wants Harp to help him stop what could turn into global nuclear war.
After his drone mishap, Harp was specifically picked by Leo for the assignment. That has Harp scratching his head. He also never quite trusts the machine’s decision making.
Anthony Mackie (Falcon in the Marvel movies) stars as Leo. He’s quite good in the role as is Idris in his. The movie — however — lets both of them down.
Director Mikael Hafstrom would have done his movie — and his actors — a real service by trimming a few scenes. Hafstrom (the Stallone/Schwarzenegger flick “Escape Plan” and the 2008 Steven King horror film “1408”) lets his movie run almost two hours. It drags in places and has characters and incidents that add very little to the story.
This isn’t to say that “Outside the Wire” is awful. It has moments where it’s entertaining and the effects aren’t bad. Unfortunately, it has much in common with other, better cyborg movies. The movie also looks a lot like peacekeeping war movies that were also done much, much better.
Like most sci-fi fans, I wanted to like “Outside the Wire.” This is one of those subjects that fascinates because we can imagine things like this really happening in the near future. We can all envision a world where these creatures exist. That’s not hard to do. From that standpoint, the concept is believable.
Where films like “Outside the Wire” fail is giving their characters multiple dimensions. One of those critical dimensions is a sense of humor. Science fiction — like horror — just seems to work better and become much more real to us when a few laughs are inserted.
▪ Rated R for extreme violence, language and mature themes. It can be seen only on Netflix.
▪ Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5
The Marksman
Liam Neeson is a very good actor. I have loved him in a lot of films. My favorite was “Schindler’s List.” Others liked his acting in films like “Michael Collins” and “Darkman.” As good as Neeson can be, he can also be predictably bad.
Here’s the predictable part. Every January or February since 2018, Neeson has starred in, and been the main character in, a really horrible movie. In 2020 it was “Ordinary Love,” “Cold Pursuit” took the prize in 2019 and “The Commuter” kicked it off in 2018.
The 2021 version of awful is “The Marksman.”
Neeson stars as a New Mexico rancher whose land borders Mexico. People from Mexico and Central and South America cross his property. Jim regularly turns them over to authorities patrolling the region.
One day a woman and her son cross Jim’s path. They’re running from one of Mexico’s ruthless cartels. He holds them up. That allows the bad guys to catch up. They open fire. She dies.
Before she passes on, the woman hands Jim an address in Chicago and makes him promise to take the boy to family there. Ignoring his promise, Jim turns the boy over to immigration. Then Jim finds a bag of money in his pickup.
It’s a lot of money.
He has financial troubles and is tempted to keep it but guilt over causing the woman’s death gets to Jim. He also knows the boy will be deported and killed by the cartel. Against his better instincts, Jim sneaks into the detention area and smuggles the kid out. Then off they go to Chicago.
Predictable dangers from the cartel aren’t far behind.
The predictability is not surprising. Movies like “The Marksman” only have a few ways to get from A to Z. That’s why writing is so important. A well-written A to Z can be palatable.
One that isn’t will suck horribly.
“The Marksman” fits in the latter category. The film’s problems start with Neeson’s performance. He hasn’t had much luck with action movies. Neeson has the look but it’s hard to believe he’d blow someone away. Part of the believability issue comes with how he’s often let down by really bad dialogue and pathetic plots. Great actors are just as victimized by badly written dialogue as those who can’t act at all.
In this case, Neeson is held hostage by three writers who’ve never written a movie. So is the rest of the cast.
One of the writers is director Robert Lorenz. Almost all of Lorenz’s experience behind the camera has been as a second unit director for Clint Eastwood. He ran that unit for films like “Mystic River,” “Million Dollar Baby” and “American Sniper.” Lorenz also directed Eastwood in “Trouble with the Curve” in 2012.
Eastwood is one of the best storytellers working today. Few can top him for keeping a movie moving and for keeping the fat out of a movie. “The Marksman” is slow, packed with scenes that have zero believability and has continuity troubles galore.
It appears that Lorenz didn’t learn a whole lot from the master and his mentor.
▪ Rated PG-13 for mature themes and some violence. It can be found on some of the usual streaming sources.
▪ Rating: 1 out of 5
This story was originally published January 14, 2021 at 7:22 PM with the headline "Mr. Movie: So-so “Outside the Wire” shows future of combat."