I don’t know what’s so weird about Twisted Metal

Allow me to associate freely for a moment.

Twisted metal is a funny show. Not funny haha like a clown. But there is a clown. The kind that finds murder funny. This is also the premise behind the famous Batman villain the Joker. He laughs at things that aren’t funny, like murder. That’s why we say he’s “twisted”. You would think, because of this, that Twisted metal is also twisted. The transitive property and all that. But the Joker has a logic to his humor. He really wants everyone to find comedy in the same as him (society). Twisted metal, and his clown Sweet Tooth, don’t have that logic. They just laugh. And I would like to laugh with them every now and then.

Based on the long-dormant PlayStation franchise, Twisted metal is a violent action comedy in the deadpool mold (deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are among the executive producers) but are missing deadpool‘s secret sauce: Ryan Reynolds, or an equivalent of Ryan Reynolds. Someone in front of the camera with an abundance of charisma and a creative approach to the tone of the project, who can tell a joke And sell it too. Instead, it offers scene after scene that the show’s creative team clearly thinks is funny, and could be be funny, if, like a real comedian, a little more time had been spent learning the jokes here.

And jokes set this apocalypse apart from the many others on offer. Twisted metal follows John Doe (Anthony Mackie), an amnesiac “dairyman” – Twisted metal parlance for couriers delivering packages from walled city to walled city in the Divided States of America. Dairy farmers are not allowed into the towns they deliver to, so they lead a solitary and itinerant life, connected only to their cars (Doe called his “Evelyn”) and paid in necessities such as gasoline. This, on top of the amnesia, has made John a little weird.

When an unusually dangerous job (from Neve Campbell, no less) comes with the promise of a home in one of the walled cities, John accepts, even if it’s not along his usual (and relatively safe) routes. As a result, John Doe must deal with the worst the wasteland has to offer: robbers, Sweet Tooth and a very determined ex-cop trying to impose his own ruthless law and order on the dystopian frontier.

This is where the show’s jokes come fast and furious (get it?). Sweet Tooth runs his own one-man residence in Vegas and wants John Doe to look into it. Lawmen imprison John in the DMV… which is now a place where people are tortured. And John never, ever stops talking.

Many of these jokes have potential: The DMV is a funny, albeit obvious, idea, and Mackie is totally committed to everything the show’s writers have to offer him. However, there is none mind, no sharpness, to what is delivered. The jokes have no purpose; they are ordinary random in the sense of Manic Pixie Dream Girl from the late 2000s, as said that Manic Pixie Dream Girls always shot people in the head.

This results in moments where characters are tortured by playing Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” on loop or forced to fill out DMV paperwork until they bleed – jokes that could be be funny but fall flat because of different choices the show makes about presentation (too clear), execution (too rushed), or writing (too much). Twisted metal‘s comedy might land better if one of those things was just a little stronger. But instead it’s all bombastic noise, and you have no choice but to bask in youth or run far away.

Ironically, this makes Twisted metal strangely compelling. When adapting a franchise that has almost no story and has basically been abandoned by the company that publishes the video game series, it’s really strange to see all 10 episodes of the show just sitting on Peacock like it was something people were asking for . It’s a strange curiosity, irreverent in a new age of all-too-serious adaptations like The last of usand confusingly awful in an age when most bad shows are just boring. Twisted metal didn’t make me laugh, but it sure is funny.