Outside the Wire - A Violent Action Movie with Some Amazing Sequence & Special Effects but not Memorable Enough

This movie was already promoted for some time and I was quite excited to watch the first action movie in 2021 in Netflix. So last night I readied myself to watch it immediately once I was home from work. Well how was the movie then? Let's find out, shall we?

Brief Story Line

Set in the year 2036, the US army started to use robotic soldiers aka Gumpys with the support of drone fighters to fight war in Eastern Europe. A young drone pilot named Lt. Thomas Harp (Damson Idris - Snowfall TV series etc) was assigned to the frontier as subordinate to Captain Leo (Anthony Mackie - The Adjustment Bureau, Night Catches Us etc) who apparently was an android military officer. Their Chief in Command was Colonel Eckhart (Michael Kelly - Viral, Chronicle etc).

Leo and Harp had a special humanitarian mission in the Ukraina which was outside their station. Though it would later appear there was additional plan to stop the dangerous terrorist Viktor Koslav (Pilou Asbæk - Overlord, Game of Thrones TV series etc). During this mission, they also met with resistance fighters led by Sofiya (Emily Beechem - Daphne, Into the Badlands TV series etc).

So how would Harp deal with working with an android while trying his best to survive without real combat experience? Find them all in this action movie.

End of Brief Story Line

When I saw the first few minutes, I was quite amazed by the intensity of the action sequence. It was enough to get me real pscyhed and kept on watching. But it was not until we were introduced with the character Leo that I was truly intrigued and excited. The prospect of watching an android soldier was quite mouth watering for me.

Anyway, as the story progressed, I could not help feel that it tried to become more complicated than needed be. The conflict seemed simple enough but then there was a strong sense of making it more complex including making unnecessary twists to my opinion. But the action part was totally awesome! I was impressed by the combat scenes, the wonderful special effects and the great fight sequence performed by Anthony Mackie. He obviously has the credential to become an amazing action star (cannot wait for his appearance in the highly anticipated Marvel series this year). 

The other cast in here was Damon Idris whom I was unfamiliar with. He was quite OK and seemed to be able to counter Mackie. While the rest of the cast did not have too large screen time to give memorable performance. Btw, there was not a lot of drama in here, but plenty of action that would satisfy fans of such. It has a duration of 115 minutes including closing credits and no mid or post end credit scenes. The violence here were pretty explicit with some foul languages, making it classified for 18+. 

My favorite action scenes were in the middle during the bank heist. However I was not satisfied with the finale. Personally, it was not a proper climax I expected, especially after the awesome moments earlier. The idea of this movie was actually pretty interesting, even if some of them might not feel to original. Those Gumpys reminded me of Robocop where robotic soldiers are deployed to fight enemies, whereas Leo reminded me a bit of The Terminator. 

Overall I found this movie to be quite entertaining in term of action with nice performance by Anthony Mackie and some cool special effects. But it was not something that I would call great action movie as it did not "wow-ed" me enough. However, if you are into this kind of thing and wanted to see just for the sake of the actions, then it should be entertaining enough. The choice is yours.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars