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.
Obliterated comes from the team behind the reasonably charming Netflix hit Cobra Kai. That series, a sequel to The Karate Kid, skewered the rose-tinted lens with which we remembered the original – making teen villain Johnny Lawrence the protagonist, who is still bitter after losing the film’s crucial match that, as he repeatedly reminds us, Danny LaRusso only won by cheating. Here, there is only minor self-reflection on who the real villains might be, with Nick Zano’s jingoistic Navy Seal mind being blown when a Russian operative explains that Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA is a bitter critique of American exceptionalism. But those moments are few and far between, and most of the programme is more Maga rally than Team America-style satire.
The comedy ranges from dick jokes to drug jokes all the way back to dick jokes again, but you can only distinguish them as gags based on context clues. The writers rely on the audience simply finding the existence of human genitals and drug consumption inherently hilarious. It’s a disquieting experience to endure, and feels like being stuck in a lift with Jay from The Inbetweeners desperately trying to convince you how sexy and tough he is.
Female characters are leered at in incongruous shower scenes; they undertake missions in string bikinis, and, for the most part, just need a man to give them a good seeing-to. There’s a walking punchline in nerdy and horny NSA agent Maya (Kimi Rutledge) who looks up to her team leader, the tough and horny CIA agent Ava Winters (Shelley Hennig). Winters in turn barks orders at Marine sniper Angela Gomez (Paola Lázaro), who is at least afforded the character trait of being queer, even if she, too, is tough and horny.
Also queer is Navy Seal Trunk (the charming but squandered Terrence Terrell), but this is barely glanced at and, for the most part, seems to exist as a brief distraction from the show’s sole black team member being the well-endowed muscle. When he’s not dropping trou, he’s complaining about being hungry, punching faceless baddies in discombobulating fight sequences and yelling lines such as: “Smell my dick, motherfucker!”
All the racial stereotypes, gratuitous objectification of women and bizarre misunderstanding of the effects of recreational drugs (why does someone say they are taking horse tranquilliser and ketamine? Why is the core team acting sober by the end of episode two? Why is MDMA making characters ravenous?) are not the most egregious thing about Obliterated. It is most let down by its “could have been an email” approach, with every interrogation, car chase and fight sequence being ludicrously bloated. The team only have six hours to defuse the bomb but somehow spend eight hour-long episodes doing it. The pace is so excruciating and the show so repetitive that by the third hour, nothing would seem more heroic than someone detonating the bomb and putting us all out of our misery.
The characters may look and act like good old-fashioned American heroes, but taking a fun premise and making it this boring is pure villainy.
• Obliterated is on Netflix
