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Twisted Metal
★★★
Stan*
There’s a long history of video games being adapted for TV (and film), but until recently, it’s not been a successful endeavour. Perhaps in part because video games are no longer considered only for children. The global industry was worth an estimated $250 billion in 2021, with half of players in the US now aged between 18-45 – a demographic beloved by TV executives.
Stephanie Beatriz as Quiet and Anthony Mackie as John in Twisted Metal.Credit: Stan
Unlike early adaptations, most recent series haven’t been aimed at kids: Assassin’s Creed and The Witcher are both M-rated, and Halo and this year’s acclaimed The Last Of Us, rated MA.
All have required some serious world expansion. But none more than the new Twisted Metal, based on a long-running “car combat” Playstation game franchise, in which the only “plot” is driving insanely modified cars in a violent competition, the sole aim in which is to be the last alive. It’s not the most obvious game for adaptation.
Showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith (a writer on Cobra Kai) and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (both writers on the Deadpool films) have used the minimal source material to create essentially a new story. Or just a story, really.
They’ve gone for a reliably popular post-apocalyptic setting, in which the US is largely a wasteland due to some unspecified (at least in the three episodes available for preview) disaster 20 years earlier, and most citizens live inside walled-off cities.
Outside these cities roam violent outlaws and outsiders, criminals who were thrown outside to “fight for what was left”, most looking like extras from Mad Max.
Marvel regular Anthony Mackie is John Doe, who works as a “milkman”, delivering packages between cities in his beaten-up Subaru. He’s an upbeat chap, considering the stresses of his job; in the first five minutes he has brutally done away with the drivers of three cars kitted out with roof-mounted rocket launchers.
But John, who has no pre-apocalyptic memories and only a burnt photo of his family, is lonely, so when Raven (an icy Neve Campbell) offers him sanctuary inside a comfortable walled city in exchange for his most dangerous delivery yet, he’s in.
Before he’s travelled far, he’s found himself a reluctant sidekick of sorts in Quiet, (Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz), who is in the sights of self-appointed cop Officer Stone (a peroxided Thomas Haden Church).
Nuufolau Joel Seanoa as the terrifying-yet-funny Sweet Tooth. It helps that he’s voiced by Will Arnett.Credit: Stan
And then there’s Sweet Tooth, a crazed killer dressed as a terrifying nightmare clown who lives alone in an old casino. Played physically by WWE wrestler Samoa Joe (aka Nuufolau Joel Seanoa) and voiced by Will Arnett, he has the series’ best lines, in the tradition of many a great 1980s/90s slasher-film psychopath.
When John befriends him in order to survive (after the pair sings the Sisqó hit Thong Song mid-fight), he explains he’s known as John Doe due to his amnesia. “Oh, what’s your brand?” asks Sweet Tooth. “Post-traumatic, transient, dissociative?”
Most of the (frequent) violence is bloody but cartoonish; even the scenes in a cannibal butcher facility are played for laughs, with potential victims kept in bathtubs of marinade.
And while there’s a thread of social commentary beneath the vehicular combat (it’s not going to beat the next season of The Last of Us to any Emmys), Twisted Metal is as bonkers as you’d expect, with enough implausible car chases to please fans of the game.
Sweet Tooth himself is the personification of the series: brutally violent yet goofy and strangely likeable.
*Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.
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