OUTSIDE THE WIRE

(Mikael Håfström, 2021, USA)

War has gone robotic in the latest Netflix original film, set only 15 years from now yet somehow featuring fully automated mechanical soldiers (nicknamed Gumps, for some reason that is never made clear) and an experimental android cosplaying as a military officer (and played by Anthony Mackie) involved in a terrifyingly plausible Ukrainian civil war. Drone pilot Harp (Damson Idris) is sent to this futuristic conflict, as punishment for a friendly-fire incident that killed two American soldiers; reassigned to Mackie’s Captain Leo, Harp experiences on-the-ground combat for the first time in an ostensible mission to deliver vaccines to a refugee camp beyond enemy lines (hence the film’s unimaginative title). Of course, there’s a little more to it than that, but the plot seems little more than an excuse to showcase Mackie’s super-soldier performing superhuman stunts, with only a few heady sci-fi notions thrown in, as a treat.

LOCKED DOWN

(Doug Liman, 2021, UK)

The first big movie of this unusual cinematic year, released directly to streaming (where else?), is ostensibly a pandemic-set heist flick, about a quarantined-together yet emotionally-separated couple (Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor) who team up to steal a £3 million diamond from famed London department store Harrods. Really, though, the film is just another in the emerging sub-genre of COVID-inflected dramedies, with the diamond heist narrative almost added as an afterthought when screenwriter Steven Knight realized he needed to have an actual plot to justify his wordy script. With its heavy reliance on video calls and news broadcasts to establish its contemporary credentials, not to mention its handheld camerawork and writerly dialogue, the film really resembles most strongly one of the many online reunion specials we’ve seen over the last year, with the cast essentially filming themselves in their own million dollar homes (Hathaway and Ejiofor’s characters share an affluent home on Portland Road in West London, likely owned by someone in the cast or crew). In that sense it further stretches and challenges the definition of what cinema really is in the streaming age.