This discussion and review contains some minor spoilers for Twisted Metal, the television series adaptation of the video game by the same name, streaming on Peacock.
Adapting Twisted Metal to screen was always going to be a challenge, particularly in the wake of the massive success of The Last of Us.
Depending on one’s preferred gaming-adjacent metaphor, The Last of Us has either “changed the game” or “leveled up” the art of adapting video games into film and television. The adaptation of Naughty Dog’s beloved game isn’t just hugely enjoyable on its own terms; it remains one of the year’s best shows and a massive ratings success for HBO. It picked up 24 Emmy nominations for its first season. Along with Succession, the series helped HBO claim its largest set of nominations ever.
Even narratively, Twisted Metal exists in a similar space to The Last of Us. It is another adaptation of a classic PlayStation game set against the backdrop of a dystopian future in which our lone heroes wander the wasteland ferrying vital supplies between walled cities. Both shows even place the end of the world at the turn of the millennium; Twisted Metal’s apocalypse hit in 2002, while the world of The Last of Us came crashing down just a year later.
While Twisted Metal wrapped shooting months before The Last of Us was broadcast, there are points where the show seems aware of its looming competitor. Although the line may have been accidental, there is an interesting aside in the show’s seventh episode, “NUTH0UZ,” in which the series’s mascot Sweet Tooth (played in person by Samoa Joe, voiced by Will Arnett) warns his traveling companions, “We all know what I do to naughty dogs.”
The Last of Us was a mature and literary adaptation of the source video game, which included needle drops like Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” and had a careful visual language when it came to the portrayal of violence. The Last of Us is contemplative, earnest, and sincere. It is populated by complex characters and often surprisingly still. It seems safe to concede that Twisted Metal has a very different energy.
That energy is perhaps epitomized by the show’s second episode, “3RNCRCS,” in which Sweet Tooth wrestles with series protagonist John Doe (Anthony Mackie) inside a rundown Las Vegas casino as “Thong Song,” by “the silver-haired god” Sisqó, plays on the soundtrack. Later, as he prepares to perform a one-man show derived entirely from the hotel’s information television channel, he serves dinner plated under two cloches positioned to suggest breasts. “Bone-a-tit,” he advises his guests.
All of this is to suggest that Twisted Metal is very dumb. The show is avowedly and insistently stupid. This is not a television show burdened by logic or reason. The series opens with a high-stakes car chase in which John’s car takes countless bullets to its frame without incurring any actual damage, but a stray bullet shatters the driver’s window instantly when the stakes need to escalate. This post-apocalyptic road rage thriller is not aiming for verisimilitude.
There is a more direct point of comparison. Both The Last of Us and Twisted Metal offer their own take on the idea of religious fundamentalists at the end of the world, a classic apocalyptic cliché. In The Last of Us, David (Scott Shepherd) is a shrewd and manipulative sociopath capable of playing mind games with his congregation. In Twisted Metal, the Preacher (Jason Mantzoukas) is a coked-up deviant hosting a “Rocky Mountain Fuckfest,” who plans to have sexual intercourse with a car.
To be fair, Twisted Metal is an adaptation of a video game about vehicular combat. It may not be a concept that lends itself to an overly self-serious approach. Indeed, Twisted Metal is rooted in a take from Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the writers behind Zombieland and Deadpool. It is directly overseen by Michael Jonathan Smith, who has worked on Cobra Kai. Stars Anthony Mackie and Stephanie Beatriz both cited that creative talent as their primary reason for signing on.
From the outset, Twisted Metal knows exactly what it is. In that opening action sequence, a copy of the source video game bounces across John’s windshield, the sort of fairly blunt fourth-wall break that one might expect from the guys behind Deadpool. At one point later in the season, John and his companion Quiet (Beatriz) hide out in a cinema. A shot closes on a standee for The Master of Disguise, and Quiet talks about watching Wild Wild West, while the pair watch Blankman together. There is a sense that Twisted Metal is placing itself in context.
The show also knows its audience. Presumably aimed at viewers old enough to remember playing the video games, the show is steeped in nostalgia for the 1990s. Sweet Tooth remembers his childhood on a late 1980s sitcom in a scene that plays as a brutal inversion of a key beat from Nope. Neve Campbell pops up in a recurring role as the ominous Raven. The soundtrack includes “Barbie Girl” by Aqua, “Steal My Sunshine” by Len, “Better Off Alone” by Alice DeeJay, and “MMMBop” by Hanson, among others.
There are moments where Twisted Metal threatens to collapse into itself. In the opening episode, Mackie isn’t so much doing too much as doing the most, perhaps an actor acknowledging the challenge in establishing a character who spends most of the episode being seen through a car window. There are also points where Twisted Metal lacks commitment to its jokes. Quiet earns her nickname by refusing to speak for the first episode and a half, but then she just speaks like any other character from that point onwards.
The show also doesn’t lean far enough into its absurdist elements. The character designs of Sweet Tooth and Agent Stone (Thomas Haden Church) are visually striking but can occasionally seem at odds with the grim-and-gritty aesthetic. Twisted Metal could be more cartoonish. This is obviously a minor complaint, but it’s also disappointing that the show seems to use computer-generated imagery for so many establishing shots of these cars driving, particularly when the action scenes include some great practical effects work.
Still, in many ways, Twisted Metal evokes the sorts of video game adaptations that were common before The Last of Us — films and television shows that would take the basic concept of a video game and then extrapolate outwards using familiar genres as touchpoints. Paul W.S. Anderson managed a pretty fun adaptation of Mortal Kombat by leaning into Enter the Dragon. Pokémon Detective Pikachu drew heavily from both Chinatown and Get Out.
It’s an approach that isn’t overly literal or beholden to established lore, instead trying to approximate some of the mood of the source material. The obvious point of reference for Twisted Metal is something like George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, right down to a plot that has the characters driving in one direction and then turning around and driving back. Obviously, Twisted Metal is nowhere near as good as Mad Max: Fury Road, but few things in life are.
It is perhaps too early to declare this approach a throwback. The ongoing Sonic the Hedgehog franchise continues to owe as much to family movies like Hop as it does the intellectual property that inspired it, while The Super Mario Bros. Movie often felt like a typical modern animated blockbuster that just happened to have some familiar iconography layered on top of it. Still, it speaks to the impact of The Last of Us that this approach feels somewhat retro just months later.
That said, underneath that charming irreverence and endearing refusal to take itself too seriously, Twisted Metal works in large part for the same reason that The Last of Us was so effective. At their core, both Twisted Metal and The Last of Us are stories about seeking human connection at the end of the world, characters realizing that all they need to get through the apocalypse is each other. Twisted Metal’s world doesn’t make any sense, but John and Quiet do.
Of course, this is the same approach that Reese and Wernick employed with Zombieland, which was essentially a story about the relationship between Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and Wichita (Emma Stone) that just happens to unfold against the backdrop of the complete collapse of civilization. In Twisted Metal, both John and Quiet are lonely outsiders who have found themselves disillusioned and abandoned by other human beings, but who ultimately strike up a romance.
It helps that Mackie and Beatriz share an easy chemistry and that Twisted Metal never overplays its hand. The show never drifts too far away from its inherent absurdity, particularly in a pair of goofy sex scenes that take place inside the ball pit of a long-abandoned franchise restaurant. The show is also remarkably consistent, understanding that this central theme is the season’s ordering principle. Every plot beat and character dynamic is informed by this central emotional idea.
There’s a lovely recurring subplot focusing on the romance between trucker Watts (Jamie Neumann) and pharmacist Amber (Diany Rodriguez). Sweet Tooth forges an unlikely bond with rescued prisoner Stu (Mike Mitchell) as “S-brothers,” because they share the same initial. While the villainous Agent Stone feels like yet another parody of a certain real-life monster, even his arc is filtered through that theme of connection, with Quiet describing him as “a sad, lonely man.”
Twisted Metal has a very different energy than The Last of Us, but that emotional core holds the show together through some delightfully absurd gags, such as Agent Stone’s enhanced interrogation process that is modeled on the experience of going to the DMV or a briefly glimpsed newspaper headline reading “Dog Funeral Beats Out Ratings for Kid Trial.” The show’s absurdist sensibility isn’t always cartoonish enough, but that central character dynamic helps to anchor it all.
Twisted Metal certainly isn’t going to take aim at The Last of Us’s high score, but it adopts the smart strategy of driving at the same core themes from a very different direction.
