He's Back (Again): Netflix and Schwarzenegger roll back the years with 'FUBAR'

In the recently concluded fan event ‘Tudum’, Netflix unveiled its latest A-lister — the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The 75-year-old actor and politician was hamming it up for the fans. He even introduced his Terminator co-star Linda Hamilton as one of the guest stars of the upcoming final season of Stranger Things, Netflix’s most popular original series. “Welcome to the Netflix family,” Schwarzenegger roared, as the fans clapped in the background. It marked a remarkable few years of what appears to be a third or a fourth wind for the action movie star. Over the last few weeks, Netflix has released two Schwarzenegger projects, both of which have been generally well-received by fans and critics. There’s the documentary Arnold, wherein the star tells the story of his own stardom, about his dizzying rise to Hollywood inner circles and later the California governorship—as also his fall from grace, the revelation that he fathered a child with his housemaid, the sexual harassment allegations and so on. There’s also the series FUBAR (the name refers to an informal military acronym that stands for ‘fucked up beyond all repair’), created by Nick Santora, where Schwarzenegger and Monica Barbaro play a father-and-daughter duo, each of whom is unaware of the other’s secret life as a CIA agent. FUBAR is very close to the contemporary, platonic ideal of ‘second-screen content’—something to look up towards intermittently while you’re busy eating or you’re busy with your phone’s screen (hence the name ‘second-screen content’). It’s not very good, and it’s not terrible either. It does not require peak attention or even 50% attention on your part because the story beats are so familiar and the characters so close to the stereotypes already defined at length by decades’ worth of espionage films and shows. Schwarzenegger, in fact, has already given us this story once before—only it wasn’t a father and daughter, it was Jamie Lee Curtis playing Arnie’s wife in James Cameron’s 1994 blockbuster True Lies, discovering that her husband is actually a CIA agent (“I married Rambo”, Curtis mutters in one of the film’s great throwaway one-liners, referring to the rivalry between Schwarzenegger and Rambo star Sylvester Stallone). FUBAR, then, is a sort of Gen Z version of True Lies—only minus James Cameron’s sense of scale and impeccable instinct for set-pieces, of course. Which isn’t to say that Schwarzenegger or Barbaro, for that matter, do not do a good job—on the contrary, they do their best with what is largely a paint-by-numbers screenplay. It’s just that FUBAR signals the extent of its ambition fairly early on and it seldom strays far from safety. The documentary series Arnold is a whole different kettle of fish. Schwarzenegger isn’t really going for the swagger of a movie star here. If anything, the mission statement here is to further rehabilitate Schwarzenegger’s image, which had rightly been in the dumps since #MeToo. That was the time journalists and fans remembered that in the mid-2000s, during his campaign for governorship, at least six women had made allegations of on-set sexual harassment against Schwarzenegger. And hence, you have the final 40-odd minutes or so of Arnold, where Schwarzenegger embarks on a sort of apology tour. He apologizes to his ex-wife Maria Shriver for cheating on her while she was pregnant. He apologizes to his female fans for “bad behavior” that happened on “some pretty rowdy movie sets” but also maintains that this was “no excuse, obviously”. During the Covid-induced lockdown era, Schwarzenegger’s Twitter account had become very popular among liberals and conservatives alike. Old-school conservatives liked him because he was one of the few Republican politicians who both talked sense and wasn’t afraid of criticising Trump. Younger liberals liked him because of his anti-Trump sentiments, his cutesy videos with farm animals and his softer stance on typically red-button Republican issues like abortion, school curricula and so on. Arnold and FUBAR, as well as Schwarzenegger’s homilies about being “part of the Netflix family”, are further attempts to secure the man’s legacy, one feels. And while they’re competently mounted pieces of media, one cannot help but see these enterprises as focus-grouped and audience-tested to oblivion, basically. And that’s a bit of a shame, because Schwarzenegger—no matter what you feel about his legendarily garbled dialogue delivery—is capable of so much more. At his peak, he was pretty good at comedy, which lent him an edge over other action stars. What’s on the menu now, however, is a humourless albeit well-thought-out rehabilitation project.

(Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.) Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.