“Might not feel like it, but these are your glory days. The salad years, y’know? Nothing is gonna beat who you are now. You can’t see all the fucked up shit that’s looming on the horizon. Enjoy this, dude. If this right now was all that there is, all the time, it’d be perfect.”
And then a moment later: “Trust me.”
So says an unnamed narrator at the end of the extended trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI that debuted this afternoon on Netflix. And the thing is: you believe him. Sort of. Do you trust him? Hell no. But maybe the guy has a point… right?
A game so long-awaited that the “long-awaited” cliché has long since stopped doing it justice, Grand Theft Auto VI takes us into the latter-day Bonnie-and-Clyde world of Jason and Lucia, a couple of protagonists who we met in the first trailer, over two years ago, upon the latter’s release from jail. In the second trailer, released a year later, they were vowing to go straight.
Well, in news that will shock no one, that’s not quite how things work out. This trailer begins with them picking up a “delivery” from a cookhouse, an assignment that goes very sideways once the cops show up. Once the duo escapes, it’s on, baby—we get car chases, we get shootouts, we get stick-ups, we get the whole damn nine yards.
A former Dominican Republic espionage type relates a story that’s an extended metaphor for knowing “when to get off.” (As in, when to stop, not… yeah.) We get Jason’s fairly nifty little turnaround jump shot and Lucia doing weights. In an amusing touch, we see an unexpected passenger in the trunk of a car that our protagonists steal, who was apparently doing the “trunk challenge,” and, on realizing that the car in which he was undertaking said challenge has been hijacked, crows with delight and asks his phone, “Holy shit, chat! What do I do??” And, fatally, we get a mission protecting a dude who’s everyone’s worst cokehead friend combined into one wait-I-have-another-idea factory. When a bunch of cartel gunmen descend to shoot everyone in sight, it’s kind of a relief.
And that’s it for this extended trailer. So as a lifetime PC user who has never owned a console, I have to say: this looks sick. The quality of the graphics was hard to parse given the load on Netflix’s servers (and their irritating policy of not letting users choose a quality setting manually), but they look on a par with the likes of Cyberpunk 2077—to which the gameplay also bore a passing resemblance, on the strength of this viewing, at least. (Escape a job gone wrong and use stealth to descend a tower with everyone looking for you? Hmmm.)
But yeah. Insofar as you can tell anything about a game from a trailer, this looks great. And let’s be honest, this could have been half an hour of Pitchfork’s immortal Jet review, and the game would still sell a squillion copies. Bandanas on, bitches.
The full extended look will be available for all to see on YouTube at 9 p.m. ET, Thursday, August 27.
PS: Oh, actually, one more thing: who in the world would ever have had money on Cliff Richard featuring in a Grand Theft Auto trailer? But it is indeed Sir Cliff’s “Devil Woman” that soundtracks much of this film. In fairness, it’s a choice that’s more than a little on the nose, given the emphasis on Lucia’s role throughout—guys, a woman can do a pretty awesome job of being a violent criminal too!—but with that said, it works surprisingly well.
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