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Cookies help us deliver our Services. By using our Services, you agree to our use of cookies. The film shot to the No. 1 slot on Netflix’s top ten and stayed there for a better part of a week, meaning that millions of viewers took the time to check out Mikael Håfström’s near future war story.

To help Harp understand the harsh truth of ground warfare, he is sent to the front lines of the war in Ukraine, where he is put under the supervision of Captain Leo (Anthony Mackie), an android combat soldier secretly embedded in the unit. While no one can say for sure if that will happen, there are some other options right on Netflix for fans seeking another sci-fi adventure with Anthony Mackie.

Who Is Mackie?

You know Mackie as Captain America’s pal Falcon, or possibly as the other guy in The Hurt Locker, or maybe as the season-two-of-Altered Carbon guy, and now we’ll find out if this sci-fi action flick is worthy of his charisma, or is just a diversion before we’re Marveled by him later this year in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. OUTSIDE THE WIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? The U.S. military now boosts its forces with robot soldiers called GUMPs, which are kind of like Chappies except bulkier and with far more tolerable Die Antwoord levels.

He defies orders and launches a missile, killing two American soldiers, but quite probably saving 38. As punishment, he’s sent to the frontlines so he can experience death firsthand, and also so he can go on a secret mission. Turns out Harp was sought out and recruited by Leo (Mackie), a synthetic AI supersoldier who looks exactly like Anthony Mackie, and is so skilled at looking like Anthony Mackie, you’d never think he wasn’t Anthony Mackie, and not everybody knows he’s not Anthony Mackie.

He’s capable of appreciating the aesthetics of listening to vinyl, and his high-end turntable with a really nice tone arm proves it. Leo and Harp have an assignment: Go OUTSIDE THE WIRE — read: beyond the razor-wire fence into dangerous areas; also, drink — and prevent lunatic warlord Victor Koval (Pilou Asbaek) from getting his hands on some nuclear codes, and possibly acquire a new diamond turntable needle. Next thing you know, Mackiebot’s leading them on their first video-game mission, and Leo’s one-strapping a backpack full of cholera vaccines for women and children through a firefight like a total greenhorn.

People get the hell killed out of them, things will go kablooey and there will be much wrangling of BIG IDEAZ about AI ethics, America’s thirst for war and human detachment from violence. But will the world be saved from nuclear holocaust? NO SPOILERS OR THERE WILL BE… TROUBLE.

Outside the Wire doesn’t give him much to do beyond the usual action-movie pose-and-quip/shout-and-toss-a-grenade stuff, though. Our Take: You know how Terminators and other assorted movie ’bot-humans run? With all due respect, this movie kinda sucks.

What Was Anthony Mackie’S Second Botched Offering For Netflix After Season 2 Of Altered Carbon?

Outside the Wire Netflix I’m not sure how many movies Netflix has tricked me into watching just because they were trending. Sadly, the latter is the case with Outside the Wire, a genuinely bad action movie that once again, does no favors for star Anthony Mackie, as this represents his second botched offering for Netflix after Season 2 of Altered Carbon (I suppose his Black Mirror episode was fine). The near-future sci-fi storyline has the US operating as a supposedly neutral force in a European civil war where Russia is trying to take back its old territories, but a rogue general is trying to escalate things by taking over Russia’s old nukes and launching them.

The weirdest part of the film is easily how it handles Leo’s character. We have seen androids played by all manner of actors over the years, wrestling with their identities, sentience and potential humanity, which requires all manner of nuance. Leo has…no nuance.

He’s extremely good at combat, sure, but he rarely does anything all that superheroic which you would expect from an android, nor does he seem to be all that much more durable than a regular soldier (he’s been programmed to feel pain to better “empathize” with humans). He refuses to fire his weapon for 95% of the film, and the movie tries to explain about fifty times why Leo has chosen him specifically for this mission, but ultimately it never does make much sense. Harp is just a blank slate for most of the film, reacting to whatever Leo does.

Does Outside the Wire get anything right? But there’s only maybe…two of these scenes in the entire movie, and it’s not worth watching a nearly two hour feature for two minutes of solid action when the rest of it is so lacking. The ending of the film, without going into detail, is one of the most baffling I’ve seen.

Half the movie feels like a commentary of the collateral damage of drone strikes, while the other half is about sacrificing a few to save many, which seems to contradict itself. I cannot recommend this movie, as you’ve far better off watching Extraction or The Old Guard instead, which are better Netflix action offerings. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

What Has Become An Accepted Aspect Of Modern Warfare?

Drones have become such an accepted aspect of modern warfare that in the past decade or so, nearly every major action franchise has used them as a raising-the-stakes shortcut. They’ve fallen into the hands of various villains in dystopian futures, like Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie and Elysium, in much-hyped sequels like Furious 7, and in all three films of Gerard Butler’s Olympus Has Fallen series. In Hollywood’s imagination, terrorists really love mechanized weaponry.

The latest movie to explore the ethical ramifications of drones, Netflix’s future-war feature Outside the Wire, stumbles with its inability to engage with those ideas, even as it prioritizes them in its world-building. Anthony Mackie’s parallel career trajectories as a military service member (in The Hurt Locker and as Sam Wilson/Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and a science fiction hero (Altered Carbon season 2, Synchronic) finally overlap in Outside the Wire, Netflix’s latest action movie about the U.S. armed forces. (It follows in the footsteps of 6 Underground, Extraction, and Triple Frontier before it.)

The film redeems its drably monochromatic production design with a snappy screenplay from Rob Yescombe and Rowan Athale, who provide a clearly-enjoying-himself Mackie with plenty of pithy one-liners and memorable insults. But larger ideological questions about humanity, artificial intelligence, and whether emotional sincerity or analytical prowess are more important for saving lives ultimately end up being immaterial in a film that settles on an overly familiar plot rather than digging into the themes it introduces and then abandons. Thanks to U.S. involvement, much of the region has been destroyed, and its people are starving.

If that means killing others, so be it. So when two Marines end up dead because Harp broke chain of command to initiate a drone strike that saved 38 other Americans, he rationalizes that he made the right choice (“the call that felt most correct,” he tells an investigating board), but his insubordination isn’t looked upon too fondly. As punishment, Harp is sent to Camp Nathaniel in the war zone itself, where his commanding officer Col. Eckhart (Michael Kelly) greets him with “You should be in jail.”

The U.S. military have developed a new killing machine, and gave it a human face. And yet for all his awareness of his mission, the commands he’s been given, and the government to whom he is responsible, Leo is resentful, bristling, and weary. Once Koval is stopped, Leo reasons, and the civil war is over, the world will be a better place.

After setting up Leo and Harp as contrasting forces — Leo as the robot who can feel; Harp as the human who can’t — Håfström doesn’t pursue what shared experiences could have shaped such different figures.

Who Plays Captain Leo In Outside The Wire?

Outside the Wire features solid leads and sparse moments of enthralling action, but it’s saddled with an ineffective gimmick and underserved by an undercooked script. Loading Set in the near-ish future, the film inserts the viewer into an Eastern Bloc civil war where the U.S. is playing ragged referee using robot soldiers (called Gumps) to patrol a battle-ravaged No Man’s Land. It’s this premise, and of course the early reveal that Anthony Mackie’s Captain Leo is a classified next-gen cyborg, that makes Outside the Wire a sci-fi film .

And that perhaps Outside the Wire’s sci-fi skin was just a shiny excuse to retell a war is bad morality tale that’s been explored countless times already. So despite the performances, some fun bits of Super Soldier action, and a (convoluted) twist, it all resonates as hollow. Though, to be fair, the ads for this film run with From the studio that brought you Extraction and The Old Guard … and those are both better movies than this one.

Mackie, as usual, is an immensely charismatic performer, capable of making the clunkiest lines of dialogue, and a seemingly unending string of exposition, feel vital. And, though we don’t know what awaits his Marvel character, Sam Wilson, in the upcoming Falcon and the Winter Soldier series, it’s a bonafide blast to watch Mackie get to fight like a Cap and/or Bucky-level badass.Stepping in as the second in this bizarre buddy cop dynamic is Damson Idris’s Lt. Thomas Harp, a drone pilot who’s sent to the front as punishment for going against direct orders and launching a strike that kills two marines (but saves over two dozen others). It’s here, with Harp, that the movie seems unable to decide on where to land regarding his greater good decision.

Leo and Harp go off-book, outside the wire, and into the war zone to stop Koval from getting his hands on nukes and it’s all profoundly less interesting than it should be. Things are briefly able to lift off whenever Mackie’s able to rampage as a one-man army, but mostly director Mikael Håfström (Escape Plan, The Rite) has crafted a very expensive, nice-looking dud that can walk arm-in-arm with other bloated and bland Netflix offerings.