‘Obliterated’ Review — Netflix’s Filthy and Fun Action-Comedy Has Heart

The Big Picture

• Obliterated is a new Netflix series from the creators of Cobra Kai, filled with sex, drugs, violence, and satire.
• The show follows an elite special forces team who must navigate their drunken states, personal issues, and a fake bomb to save the world.
• While the first episode shows promise with its NSFW humor and fast pace, Obliterated begins to wear thin and struggles with its tone and overcrowded sub-plots as the season progresses.

Take the sex, drugs, vulgarity, and the Las Vegas setting of The Hangover, the satirical nature of Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, the ironic patriotism of Team America: World Police, the violence of Die Hard, and the general concept of 24. Now throw all of those into a margarita machine. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be blended together perfectly. Pour it into your favorite novelty cup, maybe that embarrassing souvenir glass you got from Vegas. Now, you have the new Netflix series Obliterated.

Hailing from Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald, the trio behind Cobra Kai, Obliterated feels like it harkens back to the kinds of comedies that made these three successful in the first place. Before The Karate Kid sequel series, Hurwitz and Schlossberg were most known for writing all three Harold & Kumar movies as well as directing American Reunion, the fourth film in the American Pie sex comedy franchise. Meanwhile, Heald was most known for writing both of the Hot Tub Time Machine movies. That’s not exactly the kind of resume you’d expect to tackle a legacy sequel television series to a family-friendly franchise. Yet they pulled it off magnificently, turning in their best work to date. However, their new series isn’t something you’d want to watch with the whole family.

What Is ‘Obliterated’ About?

Obliterated has an amusing premise: an elite team of US armed forces decide to throw a rager after thwarting terrorists plotting to blow up Las Vegas. There’s just one thing: After hours of binge drinking, doing an indescribable amount of drugs, and having sex, they learn that the bomb they neutralized was a fake. It might sound entertaining, but is there enough there to carry eight-hour-long episodes? That’s debatable.

The first episode of Obliterated shows a lot of promise. It has all the NSFW goodness you might expect from its premise, and it takes full advantage of its TV-MA rating — not only that, but it also manages to flow at an entertaining pace. On paper, Obliterated sounds like it would work better as a movie rather than a television series, but the first hour of the show suggests that these characters might benefit from a serialized format.

Shelley Hennig stars as Ava Winters, a CIA agent still grieving after a tragedy who’s constantly feeling the pressure of her position and the high standards expected from her. Chad McKnight (Nick Zano) is a SEAL team leader with the sex appeal of Brad Pitt and the ambitions of John Rambo, but also a real heart of gold. Other notable standouts include C. Thomas Howell’s Hagerty, the elite team’s loose-cannon bomb technician who passes out right as things start to go haywire, as well as Eugene Kim‘s Paul Yung, a straight-laced helicopter pilot and helicopter parent fiercely protective of his teenage daughter Jen, who also happens to be in Vegas with her sketchy new boyfriend. These are the types of characters that would usually come across as flat and two-dimensional in a feature film, but in a series format, it’s easy to fall in love with them. It’s something that this creative team has excelled at with Cobra Kai, and they pull it off once again in Obliterated.

‘Obliterated’ Is an Unfiltered Blast, but Peaks Too Early

There’s a lot of fun to be had throughout the first four episodes of Obliterated. While not all the humor lands, and some of it might be a little too familiar and derivative of what came before, it falls under the lovely umbrella of guilty pleasure television. Like an over-the-top parody of the action series of the 2000s, it gleefully continues to up the ante, throwing these lovably goofy characters into various situations, confrontations, and interrogations. Until midway through the season, however, the schtick starts to wear thin very quickly.

While there have been numerous occasions where a series feels like it would have been better suited as a movie (and vice versa), Obliterated doesn’t feel that way, for the most part. However, there is no need for these episodes to be the same length as new episodes of The Crown. What starts out as the perfect kind of comfort watch soon becomes a bit of an effort to finish. While there is still plenty of enjoyment to be had, the series becomes overcrowded with various subplots and its tone is at battle with itself. As more plot twists are revealed, Obliterated starts to become the exact kind of series that it felt like it was initially parodying. There’s always room for sophomoric humor and jokes about male anatomy, but maybe it doesn’t need to be there during a scene where one of the main characters is being tortured.

Even in its rough patches, Obliterated is still able to retain the bulk of its charm — and a large part of that is because, underneath all of the R-rated violence and unfiltered humor, there’s quite a bit of heart. There’s a shockingly sweet storyline involving McKnight’s discovery that Trunk (Terrence Terrell), his best friend and the elite team’s muscle, is gay and has been keeping his sexuality a secret. In a lot of comedies, this would likely lead to a lot of jokes that punch down and resort to stereotypes, while in other projects it might be preachy. That’s not the case with Obliterated, and it never crosses the line of being forced or just making fun of the characters.

While it may hail from the same creative team behind Cobra Kai, Obliterated is its own thing. It’s not always effective, especially as the series begins to overstay its welcome. At its best, however, it’s the perfect kind of comfort show that you’d watch in your college dorm room — one that proves to be raunchy and violent, but also oddly sweet.

Rating: B-

All eight episodes of Obliterated are now streaming on Netflix in the U.S.

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