If there’s one thing people haven’t been interested in during the age of COVID, it’s movies and TV shows revolving around viral outbreaks. Sure, Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion gained a new lease of life during the first wave, but everything from Songbird to Locked Down has been viewed with derision, with last year’s The Survivalist also falling into a similar camp.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Malkovich take top billing in the action thriller that resolutely failed to read the room by centering its plot on the aftermath of the coronavirus. Set roughly 18 months after the onset of the Delta variant decimated the human population, Meyers’ former FBI agent dusts off his old skills to protect Ruby Modine’s virus-immune survivor from Malkovich’s fanatical zealot.
Despite holding a dismal 30 percent user rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a paltry 3.5/10 score on IMDb, The Survivalist has cast aside the fact it’s not very good to become the 15th most-watched title on the Paramount Plus global charts. Not only that, but it’s also the second-top title in both the United Kingdom and Ireland per FlixPatrol, so maybe audiences are growing receptive to COVID-influenced movies after all.
Either that, or there wasn’t anything better worth whiling away a couple of hours on, because The Survivalist doesn’t offer anything that can’t be found in dozens of very similar VOD genre flicks that flood the market on a weekly basis. Then again, the people have spoken, and they’ve opted to ignore the sense of apathy surrounding the project to give it a shot.