The buzz may be steadily building for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier following the recent debut of a fantastic first trailer, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe series isn’t even the first streaming exclusive that stars Anthony Mackie as a military veteran sporting advanced technology forced to team up with a reluctant partner to unravel a conspiracy and stop the bad guys to arrive this year.
That honor goes to Netflix’s Outside the Wire, which drops on the platform next Friday, coincidentally the same day the MCU finally returns to our screens with WandaVision. Of course, the actor is no stranger to sci-fi on the streaming service, having previously appeared in the forgotten Io, guest starred in a season 5 episode of Black Mirror and replaced Joel Kinnaman for the second and final run of Altered Carbon, but his latest looks like a much more straightforward actioner.
Mackie plays an officer whose very existence is classified given the fact he’s an android, but he finds himself out in the open when he’s forced to team up with a rookie drone pilot to track down a weapon with the potential to end the world. The new trailer doesn’t make Outside the Wire look any more original, especially when it teases a familiar subplot where the sentient AI may or may not be tempted to go rogue on his superiors, but it looks like reasonably diverting entertainment nonetheless.
Most of the focus on the 15th will inevitably fall on Mackie’s MCU stablemates in WandaVision, but Outside the Wire seems like solid counter-programming, and it’s no coincidence that Extraction and The Old Guard were mentioned by name in the promo, when both titles ended up becoming two of Netflix’s ten most-watched original movies ever.
