Nostalgia can transform one era’s trash into the present’s treasure. Many now look back fondly on 90s eroticism, action heroes who can smash their way through 100 heavily armed minions and Nicolas Cage smoking cigs midway through stealing John Travolta’s face. Upcoming remakes of Starsky and Hutch, Gladiators and Matlock are banking on audiences treasuring the memories of old-school “good v bad” narratives. John Cleese, Sacha Baron Cohen and Kelsey Grammer are all mounting comebacks of their hugely successful earlier work, which is at least partly appealing to comedy fandoms who believe you can’t make a decent joke nowadays lest a horde of progressive TikTokers tries to cancel you. In many ways Obliterated feels like a combination of the worst elements of this nostalgia, with two-dimensional goodies and baddies plus painfully unfunny, supposedly edgy humour.
The action-comedy setup is a silly but intriguing one. We meet a group of elite American soldiers, CIA agents, cyber-security and demolition experts undercover at a Las Vegas pool party. They are tasked with stopping a Russian arms dealer from supplying a nuclear weapon to a terrorist who wants to blow up Sin City. It all quickly goes to plan, and the group decide to celebrate with a night of booze, drugs and blowjobs. Unfortunately, the hedonistic festivities are cut short when a phone call from the Pentagon informs them that the bomb they stopped was a fake, and they now have to find the real nuke – despite barely being able to stand up straight.
