Twisted Metal Forgets The One Thing That Made Its Combat Video Games So Popular
This article contains spoilers for "Twisted Metal" Season 1
Peacock's "Twisted Metal" has a lot going for it. It has plenty of star power in Anthony Mackie, Stephanie Beatriz, Neve Campbell, and Thomas Haden Church. It has a fun 1990s-tinted take on the post-apocalyptic action genre. It even manages to bring the series mascot Sweet Tooth (Samoa Joe and Will Arnett) to life in a highly effective way. And yet, it forgets one of the key things in the source material.
We're talking, of course, about the car battles. Just like a martial arts movie needs to feature fights from the get-go, a show that's based on what might just be the finest vehicular slugfest franchise this side of a particularly chaotic "Mario Kart" session should consist of little more than car battles and people preparing their cars for car battles.
In all fairness, "Twisted Metal" does deliver on this front in its opening scene, where Mackie's John Doe fights bandits inside an abandoned mall. After that ... well, it's another story. In fact, the show's first three episodes are strangely devoid of any real car combat.
Too few car battles at the beginning is a bad sign for the show as a whole
Episode 1 of "Twisted Metal" opens with the aforementioned fantastic car battle and the second one features a short chase sequence where Sweet Tooth goes after John Doe and Quiet (Beatriz). However, apart from those moments, the first third of the show — the part of the arc that would do well to establish the show's nature as a demolition derby extravaganza — features very little on this front. Episode 3, in particular, features zero car action and barely has the characters inside a vehicle at all.
Even though the non-car stuff is entertaining enough, a show based on the "Twisted Metal" games should live and breathe car battles. Instead, its tendency to barely give viewers such wham scenes during its first episodes could very well be a worrying sign for the fans who tune in to see the car-on-car action the franchise is famous for, only to wander away after the first few episodes fail to deliver.