FUBAR is the type of series an actor makes after a rough patch and has lost their standing many years earlier. One month away from his 78th birthday, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a testament to his catchphrase “I’ll be back.”
When Last Action Hero bombed, he did True Lies and got a temporary career resurgence. When action movies changed with the Y2K era, Schwarzenegger gave up acting mostly to run for governor of California. And when that was over, he returned to acting and hit it off with small roles in the first three Expendables movies which surprisingly worked even though they were mostly glorified cameos.
Then, he returned to a lead actor in the surprisingly great and entertaining The Last Stand, a neo-western style action movie where he played an Arizona sheriff whose small staff along with the town folks stop the army of a major drug dealer trying to make a clean break for Mexico. He had a wonderful attempt at drama in the horror movie Maggie. And even Escape Plan was a nice little prison action thriller.
Regardless, Schwarzenegger knows his prime is behind him and he’s not trying as hard as others. But that doesn’t mean he can just act a fool like Bruce Willis cashing a check. Yet, FUBAR can’t move past its awful execution. Since it’s made for Netflix and also filmed in Canada, there’s a lot of interior scenes as well as exterior scenes out in the middle of BFE Ontario.
Four of the eight episodes of season two are directed by Phil Abraham and three others are directed by Jeff T. Thomas. I don’t think this was a coincidence. By the way everything looks, it appears the actors were allowed to film their scenes under one director for multiple episodes when necessary to keep film costs down. You can always tell when someone is talking to a script supervisor or producer off camera during these scenes. And there’s way too many scenes of people looking at screens, while action happens.
And to pad those eight episodes, it seemed they told Fortune Feimster as CIA operative Ruth “Roo” Russell to crack a joke every time a line is said by another character and they would edit out what they could. We get it! She’s a lesbian! If this was 20 years ago, there might be some originality to it. But it’s the same type of joke over and over and over.
It also seems like they didn’t have a good enough story this time because there’s so much padding the episodes. It’s mostly the characters arguing and bickering among each other. Because apparently, directors and producers think that is comedy now. It isn’t. There has to be some formula and chemistry. And Schwarzenegger has been funny before. He knows how to do comedy.
But this isn’t comedy. It’s a lot of arguing and disagreeing. You’d think someone just scoured social media threads for dialogue with all the back and forth yelling and screaming. There’s a lot of people to follow that you never really care about the plot which is basic from your average James Bond flick in which agents try to stop a terrorist from destroying the world. When Schwarzenegger did this in 1994 with True Lies, it felt fresh as the Bond movies were in limbo.
There also was some humor that Schwarzenegger was mocking his stature as an action hero as he did in Last Action Hero. This time around, Luke Brunner (Schwarzenegger) and the rest of his team and family have been living in a safe house after their identities were released at the end of the first season. Luke is still coming to terms with his daughter, Emma (Monica Barbaro), who he discovered was also a CIA agent while trying to rekindle his marriage to his estranged former wife, Tally (Fabiana Udenio).
And there’s Carrie Ann Moss as Greta Nelso, a former East German spy who was also an ex-lover of Luke’s that complicates matters as they track down a terrorist, Dante Crest, and bicker and argue for most of the movie. The jokes wear out very thin. When CIA agent Aldon Reece (Travis Van Winkle) is saved by a pot-bellied pig, he later calls it “Hamsteak” and adopts it. There could have been some great humor here but it goes overboard you’d think Happy Madison Productions was involved in the production.
This series wants to have it both ways. It wants to be a parody of spy action thrillers while at the same time with so much over the top violence that fubar is the right term for it. Just FYI, fuber is acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.” And yes, it is very much.
What’s worse is this movie sets up a third season that I don’t know will be made. But who cares? If you’ve seen one of these movies or storylines, you’ve seen them all. Schwarzenegger has talked about the popularity his son, Patrick, has received following the reception of The White Lotus third season. Maybe it’s time to pass the torch.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 