Multi-layered Outside the Wire is part action thriller, part intimate drama

Enlarge / Anthony Mackie and Damson Idris must foil a a warlord's plan to launch a network of dormant nuclear weapons in Outside the Wire. (credit: Netflix )

To say that Netflix is leaning into its recent forays into feature film-making is an understatement. The streaming giant announced earlier this month that it will be releasing a new feature film on its platform every week in 2021. Among the streamer's January releases was Outside the Wire, in which Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Falcon in the MCU, Synchronic) stars as an android military officer who teams up with a disgraced drone pilot to ward off a nuclear attack.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Director Mikael Hafstrom is a Swedish director best known for the Oscar-nominated 2003 film Evil, and 1408, a solidly spooky, haunted hotel/psychological horror film starring John Cusack and based on a short story by Stephen King. So Outside the Wire is something of a departure for him: partly a military action thriller, and partly a psychological study of its two central characters. It's the latter aspect that most strongly bears the hallmark of Hafstrom's artistic sensibility. Per the official synopsis:

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