Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Most Dangerous Game: New York’ on the Roku Channel, a Rock-Solid Manhunt Drama That Survived the Quibi Meltdown

Most Dangerous Game: New York (now on the Roku Channel) is one of the few surviving series from the Great Quibi Massacre of 2020. The series, roughly the umpteenth adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, stars Christoph Waltz as the engineer of a big-money/high-stakes “sporting event” that dangles a fat cash prize in front of a highly skilled sucker who will be hunted for 24 hours by five kill-happy high bidders through a dense urban environment. In the first season (available in its original Quibi snippet form on Roku, or pieced together as a two-hour “movie” on Amazon Prime Video), Liam Hemsworth was the huntee, scrambling through Detroit in 15 10-minutes-or-less episodes; this time, it’s David Castaneda (of The Umbrella Academy), the hunting ground is the Big Apple and he’s gotta survive a dozen nine-to-11-minute eps, although the first one clocks in at a positively epic 21 minutes. 

MOST DANGEROUS GAME: NEW YORK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An establishing drone shot of New York City, which makes you wonder if there are hundreds of establishing drone shots of New York City being taken every day.

The Gist: Several months have passed since the first season. Miles Sellars (Waltz) meets with his boss (Anna Gunn!), who sternly warns him that there will be hell to pay if he drafts another “contestant” who will actually win their sicko-ass little game. They have new investors and, like investors in a hedge fund or start-up, their psychopathy must be satiated. Pressure’s on. No tolerance for f—ups. Sellars meets in the boardroom to go over new candidates, forcefully shooting down a suggestion by an underling who has the gall to say, “To dismiss him out of hand would be foolish.” Let’s just say Sellars doesn’t respond to such things graciously. He has INVESTORS to worry about, and those guys are worse than mobsters and pirates.

Sellars pores over the files and narrows his choice down to Victor Suero (Castaneda), an MMA palooka from the Bronx with one bad eye and a kid sister, Josie (Martina Ortiz-Luis), he saved from the same burning building that killed their parents. We meet Victor as he’s getting ground-and-pounded into the canvas for a pissant payday of $200. Josie throws in the towel so he doesn’t, you know, die. He’s 33 and still dreaming of glory in the octagon. Read: He’s a schmuck with no money, and not the type to give up too easily, which’ll at least make him hard to kill, but surely not too hard, right? And so the auction begins, and five rich sicko hunters are gonna cough up $225 million each to chase the guy through the streets of NYC. And as is tradition, the hunters’ pseudonyms are the names of presidents, so we have Monroe, Tyler, Pierce, Taft and Ford, the latter of whom sets up a great gag about falling down the steps, if the series’ writers know what the eff they’re doing.

Of course, Victor has yet to be recruited. Lucky for Sellars, Josie has a secret skeezy courier gig, delivering bags of cash for Russian heavies. And wouldn’t you know it, she just had a duffel bag containing $500k lifted from her, so the goons call in her big bro and say shit like, “You will get me money by end of week.” Victor isn’t easily ruffled, so the thugs brazenly murder a guy right in front of him to show they mean business and that they don’t care if there’s a witness. And still, Victor doesn’t blink. He’s tough. He tells ’em there’s no way he can come up with that much money by “end of week,” and that’s when he’s handed a card with Miles Sellars’ phone number on it. As Admiral Ackbar said, “It’s an ambuscade – a conspiratorial subertfugal stratagem!”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Any TV series worth its salt – there are dozens, from Star Trek to The Simpsons to Xena: Warrior Princess – has an episode inspired by Connell’s original man-hunt story.

Our Take: As we should reasonably expect, the debut episode of MDG: NY is all setup and no action, at least beyond Victor getting his noggin clobbered in the fight ring. It sets up a compelling top-down dynamic from Gunn’s steely evil-CEO vibes to Waltz’s slippery middle-management scheming to Castaneda’s cool-under-pressure everyman characterization to Ortiz-Luis’ potential to be a wild card in the deck – a dynamic that, from the initial look of it, has a good chance of maintaining our interest for the season’s remaining 110 minutes and change. 

The cast is easily the series’ strongest component; the right talent can render even the most far-fetched concepts entertaining, and one can’t help but wonder if Waltz and Gunn sat in on Amazon or Goldman Sachs board meetings so they could properly portray Oscar de la Renta’d slimelords strategizing about how to kill the little people. (Maybe there’s a bit of social commentary lurking in the subtext here, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) The production values are slick and the pace quick (it’s gotta be) and so far, so good for a chunk of suspenseful – and hopefully eventually action-packed – escapism. 

Sex and Skin: None so far.

Parting Shot: Waltz shows us his trademark grin, which is the clear successor to Jack Nicholson’s Least Reassuring Smile in Hollywood.

Sleeper Star: Few people can laser through Waltz’s entertainingly smarmy shtick with an icy line reading, and one of those people is Anna Gunn. Slice ’em up, Anna, slice ’em up.

Most Pilot-y Line: Sellars to Victor, in the final shot: “Helping people is what I do.”

Our Call: Odds are, a strong concept and an even stronger cast should easily carry MDG: NY for a couple of hours. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.