Anthony Mackie made his screen debut opposite Eminem in 8 Mile, and over the last eighteen years, he’s gone on to become a reliable presence that rarely, if ever, puts in a bad performance. His involvement in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made him a very big star, and he’ll finally take center stage in one of the franchise’s projects when he shares top billing with Sebastian Stan in The Falcon and the Winter Solider, but the 42 year-old also appears to have formed a solid working relationship with Netflix.
Since starring in little-seen sci-fi Io, which was added to the streaming service in January 2019, Mackie has been all over the content library. He appeared in Black Mirror season 5 episode “Striking Vipers,” replaced Joel Kinnaman as Takeshi Kovacs for the second run of Altered Carbon, teamed up with Frank Grillo for action thriller Point Blank, and will turn up in next year’s star-studded psychological drama The Woman in the Window alongside Amy Adams, Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore.
Before that, however, the actor returns to sci-fi territory in Outside the Wire, which hails from Escape Plan director Mikael Hafstrom and hits Netflix next month. Mackie stars as an android military officer who teams up with a drone pilot to try and locate a device with the capabilities of destroying the world before enemy insurgents get their hands on it.
Hafstrom has always been a competent filmmaker without ever being spectacular, and while the trailer released earlier today and seen up above hardly reinvents the wheel or promises any sort of originality, the presence of Mackie in the lead role should be enough to guarantee that Outside the Wire provides some reasonably diverting entertainment worth whittling a couple of hours away on.
