★★★☆☆
FUBAR, a show which boldly asks “what if Ronald Reagan took up weightlifting and killed people for the CIA,” is the first we’ve seen of ol’ Arnie in what feels like a while. The undisputed action king of the 80s, in his first scripted TV outing, attempts to combine three very disparate sides of his career. There’s his aforementioned shooting-a-gun-and-quipping-at-corpses side; his 90s Twins/Junior-style family comedy vibe, and the knowledge that, in the years since, he served two terms as the Republican Governor of California from 2003-2011.
Surprisingly, a lot of the resultant buff Frankenstein’s monster of a show works. Despite a monumentally goofy script (“It smells like donkey ass down here”), a tone swinging more wildly than an SMG strapped to the hip, and a few action scenes which largely remind us that Schwarzenegger’s not as young as he used to be, FUBAR is, for the most part, a gently entertaining family comedy. Just one with semi-regular f-bombs and the odd close-up of someone being shot in the head.
FUBAR (a name entirely at odds with the tone of the show) sees Arnie in full REPUBLICAN DAD mode: he doesn’t like it when young ladies curse, thinks a real man should be able to fix his own car, and thinks sending a drug lord’s son to business school will surely set him on the straight and narrow.
His wife also divorced him 15 years ago, but it’s hard to see how those things are connected.
In any case, after decades pretending to be a gym equipment salesman to justify his frequent sudden trips away from home (?) Luke Brunner is finally ready to hang up his CIA cape to focus on his long-term goal of winning his ex-wife back.
You can see why, really, because the Brunners do seem to have a pretty idyllic home life. Luke’s daughter, Emma (Top Gun: Maverick’s Monica Barbaro) has a long-term boyfriend and works for a global water charity; his ex-wife (Fabiana Udenio) is bizarrely friendly to him, and his son (Devon Bostick) has an adorable step-daughter, who everyone universally loves.
credit: Netflix
But, when A NEW THREAT emerges in far-away Guyana (where everyone dresses exactly like Californian businessmen, apparently) Luke Brunner must saddle up for ONE LAST MISSION to stop TERRORISTS getting their hands on a series of HANDHELD NUKES. Arnie, it seems, is back on good form.
Or he would be, were he not a little preoccupied. Emma, shockingly, isn’t the goody-two-shoes first chair violinist Luke thought she was. Turns out, she’s also a spy – and they’ve been assigned to the same case! D’oh!
What this translates to is a tone which feels far more Brooklyn Nine-Nine than 24. Quirky, soft rock music plays whenever someone isn’t being shot at, and no-one, Arnie included, seems to be taking the threat of nuclear annihilation very seriously. The episodes, though they do tell one continuous arc, are structured exactly like a typical US sitcom – the CIA’s director gives the team a mission, Arnie makes a few quips about socialized medicine, then Brunner family drama plays out before one low-budget action sequence happens and they save the day.
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There’s a reason, though, that every sitcom on the planet is split into half-hour episodes rather than pushing an hour each. The pace of each segment feels pretty glacial, and though the characters are all likeable enough, their excessively light n’ breezy attitude can get a little draining after a while. Most of the jokes are pretty gently amusing, but a few bits – like a chalk and cheese double-act between two CIA operatives – really don’t work.
When that happens, it’s unfortunate that FUBAR doesn’t have much in the way of dramatic stakes to fall back on. Everything feels like such a big joke that any tension deflates before it has much of a chance to get going.
Still, as an excuse to switch off your brain and watch Arnie do what he does best, you could do a lot worse than FUBAR. For eight long-ish hours, the CIA are indisputably the good guys; everyone (drug kingpins included) is quite nice, and there’s not a problem that can’t be solved by a spot of family bonding and a rocket launcher. To borrow Luke’s irritatingly frequent catchphrase from the show: “that’s it, and that’s all.”
All eight episodes of FUBAR are streaming on Netflix now.
