FUBAR Review: Arnold Schwarzenegger is Having Fun Again on Netflix Series
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Monica Barbaro, Jay Baruchel, Gabriel Luna, Fabiana Udenio
Creator: Nick Santora
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Since May 25, 2023, the entire first season of FUBAR has been available on Netflix, the new original series starring the legendary Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first role in a spy/action-comedy TV series. FUBAR tells the story of a CIA agent nearing retirement who forced to accept one last assignment, decides to solve it before retiring and dedicating himself to the longed-for retired life aboard his sailing ship. With eight episodes, FUBAR promises to be an entertaining comedy about family and human relationships. However, sadly, the series fails to fully meet expectations. FUBAR is the perfect TV series for Arnold Schwarzenegger who does what he has always done in cinema: the good hero, tough but with a soft heart, a nice family man, and a loving husband.
A series that traces his career in the cinema from pure action like Commando to comedies like True Lies, to comedies like The Twins. If it weren’t for him as the protagonist, it would be a completely wrong series, but it’s perfect for Schwarzenegger. Under the skilled hands of Nick Santora, skilled in making generalist TV action serials, Schwarzy could not have wished for anything better. If Luke Brenner decides to run for some political office in the next season, it would be the ideal closing of a circle. An absurd project even for the Netflix catalog is not to be able to make Schwarzenegger the Chief Action Officer and make it clear that beyond teen dramas, romances, and Spanish melodramas, there is also a lot of action.
FUBAR Review: The Story Plot
Luke Brunner and his daughter Emma have been lying to each other for years, neither of them knowing that the other is a CIA agent. Once they both find out the truth, they realize they don’t know anything about each other. When they discover that they have both been secretly working as CIA agents for years, Luke Brunner (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his daughter Emma (Monica Barbaro) realize that their entire family relationship has become a lie and that they don’t know each other at all. Like, father and daughter. Forced to work as a partner in the most unexpected way ever, for Luke a return to a business that only follows his retirement, an already risky undercover mission for the CIA turns into an uncomfortable family matter, with Emma increasingly intolerant to the fact that her father still treats her like a child.
Between them, sparks will break out and, perhaps, a newfound desire to get to know each other as if it were the first time. This is the incipit of FUBAR, a television series with eight episodes arriving on Netflix starting Thursday 25 May, and entirely conceived by Nick Santora (here also as executive producer and screenwriter of some episodes). A real event for the small screen, given that the Netflix show practically acts as the official debut for the Austrian actor in the vast universe of seriality as a recurring and absolute protagonist. A goal, that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, which the interpreter achieves at the “venerable” age of 76, without losing a gram of his proverbial charisma.
FUBAR Review and Analysis
From the first to the last minute, FUBAR embodies all the stereotypes of the 90s action-comedy filmography. From the characters to the stories, everything is so fragmented that it seems impossible to have a TV series released in 2023. Probably, however, the structural rigidity of the formula is necessary to replicate the acting rigidity of Schwarzenegger, unable to get out of the character he has been immersed in for over 30 years. Hats off to Sylvester Stallone who with Tulsa King remained anchored to his character but in a decidedly more modern context. Fortune Feimster is an acting mystery. His comedy will perhaps be perfect live, in stand-up comedy shows, but within serial contexts, he is always out of focus, out of context with a different rhythm than the rest of the story.
Not only that but she is often assigned roles in which the comic part is so absurd as to be impossible, unthinkable, and unrealistic. FUBAR is a wasted opportunity because The Night Agent had recently demonstrated how it was possible to make a successful, simple but effective action series. In this case, however, the only thought was to propose to those who watched Schwarzenegger’s films their favorite in the contexts they already knew. The family component beyond the action is added in an almost artificial way, with situations that arrive suddenly and improvised without any warning just to add elements to the general plot and complicate the life of the characters. Jay Baruchel appears so out of context (albeit in a perfectly ideal role for him) that he seems like the classic actor who accepts a role because he has a mortgage to pay. Overall, FUBAR is a series that Schwarzy fans should not miss, to be discarded for everyone else.
On balance, we would say that the action series created by Nick Santora has reason to exist in the function of its peculiar and cumbersome protagonist. Bringing an interpreter of such level and popularity back to the camera is a considerable gamble, and precisely because FUBAR follows all the founding narrative elements of the cinematic action comedy with respect and simplicity, it works best when viewed as a homage and light celebration and entertaining of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career in front of the camera.
So much so that in certain passages, FUBAR seems to want to hook up to a dynamism of events, situations, and characters such as to recall the freshness of one of the Austrian actor’s most cult and perhaps most underrated titles: the 1994 True Lies directed by James Cameron. Also, in that film, Schwarzenegger played the role of a secret agent who worked undercover even if without the knowledge of his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis), the protagonist of a daring adventure that perfectly mixed typical action elements with the most crystalline comedy. So does FUBAR to some extent, though nowhere near the directing and writing brilliance of that ’90s title.
The television series signed by Netflix and created by Nick Santora nevertheless fails to distinguish itself from other contiguous and content-similar television products, very soon ending up being weak and derivative. The writing of the show fails to calibrate exquisitely action moments to other lighter and more comedic ones, the latter more linked to the relationship/clash that is progressively created between Luke and his daughter Emma, and it’s a bit of a shame.
The result, at the end of the day, is a package that deserves viewing only for extra-productive merits: we just need to realize that in FUBAR Arnold Schwarzenegger gets rid of many personal burdens of the past and takes on the role of the protagonist with a certain lightness and self-irony that he had lacked for some time? We don’t, but it should instead be enough for the substantial horde of fans and aficionados of the European-born actor, eager to binge-watch FUBAR, the emaciated Hollywood star’s debut in a television series in which he is the (almost) absolute protagonist.
FUBAR Review: The Last Words
The Netflix series created by Nick Santora and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger entertains the right yet at the same time boring however derivative it is, devoid of biting humor, devoid of at least memorable situations or sequences. A respectable action television product that will disappoint the savviest and will make aficionados of the great Austrian actor happy. FUBAR is a concentration of stereotypes from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 90s films with the former governor who does not deviate from the roles that made him famous. The series works little and badly and even the entertainment element is at times lacking. But it’s built around its protagonist trying to shine in this new/old guise.
