An incompetent action thriller that ended up regretting its own title takes on a dangerous streaming assignment

If you’re bold and brave enough to name your movie after a word that literally means “a person highly skilled in an artistic pursuit,” then it’s best to make sure the end product can back it up. Based on an 18 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, though, The Virtuoso failed to meet even the lowest of expectations.

Director Nick Stagliano aims for a polished slice of genre cinema that treats its world with the utmost seriousness, but it’s more pretentious and portentous than engaging and exciting. Befitting the weakness of the script, the characters don’t even have names, with the cast populated by such one-note archetypes as The Virtuoso, The Waitress, The Mentor, The Loner, The Deputy, and so on.

The cast is supremely talented, though, which makes things all the more frustrating when it’s a hard-boiled modern noir focusing on an assassin being tasked to take out a rogue member of the same profession boasting Anson Mount, Anthony Hopkins, Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan, and more among its number.

However, it shouldn’t need to be noted at this stage that any action thriller backed by a bevvy of recognizable names and bursts of eardrum-shattering gunfire is fittingly bulletproof on streaming, with The Virtuoso living up to expectations by making a return on streaming. Per FlixPatrol, it’s become one of the top-viewed titles on Prime Video over the weekend, despite the shortcomings of not being very good.

It runs and it guns, which is more often than not enough to ensure a second wind on-demand, even if audiences may not be won over by what they end up getting.