Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022) review – tight action trapped in cynical, spineless form

If you like brash, explosive, Brosnan-era Bond action with outrageous, blockbuster set-pieces and peak Michael Bay spectacle, then boy do I have the game for you: it’s available now on next-generation hardware, it’s called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and it came out in 2009.

The original Modern Warfare 2 was huge, a cultural event after the breakout debut of the first Modern Warfare subtitle but also a remarkable reflection of that culture itself at the time. It was a bleak reflection of the west’s shared headspace in the late noughties, playing up on jingoism and melodrama and a general post-9/11, mid-forever war, Pearl Harbour-esque fear of American vulnerability to surprise attack. There was an argument, too – not that many tend to agree with it – that a close reading might find something almost, nearly, verging on an anti-imperialist message, what with its tale of ultra-nationalists inciting invasions and warmongering commanders-in-chief using their window to take the world for a ride.

That might be a little generous, but at least there was something there, some scraps of direction, theme or tone to cling to. Even if they led to an impossible tension with a game that still used contemporary wars as a playground, at least there was a tension to wrestle with, a bit of substance to bite into. There were glimpses of this in the first of these new Modern Warfare retcons in 2019, which seemed to be grasping for something adjacent to “war is bad”, if not always reaching it successfully. Above all, both had undeniable spectacle, which has always been this series’ safety net to fall back on when its often haphazard storytelling has failed – there are plenty of stories, across more mediums than games, about nothing more than big explosions, cool guns, and good guys getting it done. Keep them abstract, and keep them relentlessly entertaining, and their breed of empty escapism is more than welcome.

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