It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suggest that Austin Powers almost ruined the spy genre, with all of the tropes associated with cinematic espionage being so mercilessly pilloried and mocked by the shagadelic secret agent that the James Bond franchise was forced to rebuild from the ground up after Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day.
In the meantime, two other J.B.’s took 007’s place at the forefront of the conversation, with Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne dragging the standard formula into the modern day by gifting audiences with rough and ready action heroes that kicked ass, and sometimes didn’t even bother taking names because their opponents were already dead.
However, a trio of very distinctive spy movies have found themselves nestled comfortably in the Netflix Top 10 most-watched list as per FlixPatrol, and the fact they couldn’t be any more different from each other showcases the malleable versatility that’s made subterfuge, counterintelligence and gadgetry such an enduringly popular style of filmmaking.
Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart’s buddy comedy Central Intelligence is in third, with Matt Damon’s long-awaited fourth outing as the iconic amnesiac in Jason Bourne sitting in eighth, while Tom Cruise brings up the rear by scaling the world’s tallest building in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, proving that spy sh*t is always guaranteed to draw in a crowd on streaming.