Arnold Schwarzenegger's TV debut FUBAR feels stuck in the past
FUBAR spoilers follow.
Arnold Schwarzenegger roars onto screens for his TV debut on Netflix this week in FUBAR, which sees him get in choppers, get out of choppers and say the word "chopper" again and again, in many, many nods to his infamous Predator scene.
Schwarzenegger ostensibly stars as CIA veteran Luke Brunner, but in reality plays a version of Arnie sprung from the popular conception of him. Luke is on the verge of retirement when he's pulled back in with the age-old lure of one last job – to save another operative, who turns out to be his CIA nepo-baby daughter Emma (Monica Barbaro).
Billed as an action-comedy spy series, FUBAR sets up its CIA workplace comedy with gags that hit the humorous heights of a knock-knock joke – with the exception of occasional punchlines from Schwarzenegger, which include a Danny DeVito jibe that will drive Twins fans wild.
Yet unlike your usual action-comedy fare, the show takes its espionage slightly too seriously, which turns a harmless effort into something queasier when we meet the villains of the piece in the first episode.
Despite telling her dad she had been sourcing fresh water for Colombia, Luke discovers his daughter Emma is in fact deep undercover in Guyana, in the fortified compound of Boro Polania (Gabriel Luna), the son of a paramilitary leader Luke killed 25 years ago on a job questionably named Operation Jungle Book.
We're told that – despite Luke's investment in Boro receiving a stand-up Western education – he has since "dedicated his life to finishing what daddy started" and become a senseless arms dealer with an army of followers.
The first episode of FUBAR – a military acronym which stands for F**ked Up Beyond All Recognition – sees us parachute into Boro's fortress, where Luke and his daughter Emma do enough damage to earn the show its title.
As the two maestro CIA operatives get to another formulaic execution of the genre, the shooting and killing part, this comedy turns decidedly humourless, because their opponents are an undifferentiated mob of Latino men.
We learn Luke has a special ability to slit a man's throat vertically, so it bleeds out faster, which is then practiced on two indeterminate henchmen. Emma and Luke proceed to stab and run over victims in scenes that seem to be going for slapstick and tot up quite a body count, all of whom are dumped in a rice paddy field.
These foot soldiers appear to exist only so that FUBAR can hit a perceived punchline or tap into Luke's kill skills. They're intentionally anonymous, bad and dangerous, creating the implication that their often violent murders are justified.
When Luke and Emma are rumbled by Boro, their CIA pals Roo (Fortune Feimster) and Aldon (Travis Van Winkle) appear in a chopper – another one! – and quickly pick off henchmen from the sky with automatic rifles, like kills in a video game.
When the undifferentiated army of Latino jungle fighters are shot down, you’re not supposed to feel a twinge of sympathy, because they’re bad guys. They’re nameless, faceless people the camera doesn't even pay particular attention to.
But the imagery becomes inherently questionable given that their good guy killers are a group of white Americans who are often blurting out tired quips as the supposed villains fall to the floor.
The casually racist overtones of FUBAR's senseless high body count of non-white men have long beleaguered this genre, but should have long been shaken off by now.
It's a similar story for the lynchpin of the operation, Boro, whose motivations beyond some vague fatherly fidelity are never really fleshed out. "I will torture you all! Days of agony! Until I tire of it!" he screams at one point, trying to lend credibility to a campy line. So he just shows up and is bad, as are his followers.
There is certainly no real understanding of why or how Boro came to be where he is from the point Luke last left him, so the machinations behind his current villain status are never developed. Instead, there's a bitter undercurrent in the fact FUBAR doesn't really humanise him, until the final episode showdown, at which point Luke seems to have contracted the show's uninterest toward him and goes nuclear.
How to characterise the bad guys has been a long-standing dilemma of action fare on screen, with some exports like Top Gun: Maverick making the enemy purposefully vague to avoid throwing fuel on geopolitical fires or risk a box-office slump in certain countries.
However, it is possible to make a show like FUBAR, with a villain and henchmen, but make it much better than this. Bad guys like Gus Fring in Breaking Bad or Homelander in The Boys, who are filled out into believably dark characters, can make a show complicated and interesting.
Given that FUBAR is weak on character development across the board, this may have been a bit too much to ask, but it doesn’t mean they have to fall back onto formulaic tropes that leave a bad taste in the mouth.
FUBAR is available to stream on Netflix.
You Might Also Like
