Amazon and its rival streamers are pumping out so much content that it’s possible for a show featuring A-list movie stars and packed with action to become a big hit without anyone actually noticing.
A case in point is The Terminal List – a Call of Duty-style military drama featuring Guardians of the Galaxy’s Chris Pratt and Taylor Kitsch of Friday Night Lights – which most of us have never have heard of despite it gaining a substantial audience in 2022.
It is now returning as a prequel series, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. Pratt is back, but in a more peripheral role. Instead, the focus turns to Kitsch and his maverick Navy SEAL, Ben Edwards. As introduced in an undercover mission in Iran in the first of seven episodes, he’s a natural born rule-breaker who grunts like a millennial Clint Eastwood and says things like “every battle is about bringing your brothers home”.
Kitsch was supposed to be movie star, until he had the bad luck/judgment to appear in the 2012 Disney sci-fi misfire John Carter. It wasn’t his fault the film flopped. The problem was that the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels from which it was adapted were much too obscure for modern audiences.
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Still, he has carried the weight of that failure. In Dark Wolf he has the body language of man who has been to hell and back. As the story gets under way, he is saddling up for one more trip into the furnace as he and his team are tasked with neutralising Iran’s nuclear threat – cue numerous firefights with Iranian-backed radicals in Iraq. There are also brief encounters with shadowy intelligence agencies that have their own agenda – and aren’t always on the same side as Ben and his band of brothers.
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Dark Wolf is well made. You can feel the grit of the desert heat in Iran and the comradeship between Edwards and the men under his command rings true. There is also an important life lesson in that his attempts to do the right thing and take the higher ground invariably have tragic consequences. In the shadowy world of black ops, moral purity is more of a curse than a blessing.
At the same time, there’s no getting past the fact that Dark Wolf feels like an early 21st-century Xbox shooter brought to the screen. It’s like watching a string of cut scenes arranged end to end, with all the fun, trigger-happy bits expunged. There isn’t a lot of Pratt, who, with his reddish hair and carefully cultivated scruff, bears an unsettling resemblance to Prince Harry during his Iraq deployment years.
Still, Kitsch throws himself into the fray – literally so during an early waterborne assault on a bridge – and there is an undeniable punch to Dark Wolf’s beautifully executed action sequences. It’s loud and noisy and not for everyone. But for fans of mindless firefights, this series is fun, and much smarter than it has any need to be.
