Much like fellow genre stalwarts Liam Neeson, Denzel Washington and Jason Statham, any action thriller that comes bearing Gerard Butler’s name attached is destined to find a new lease of life on streaming, regardless of what the critics think.
Essentially the four top dogs of mid budget running and gunning, the quartet have seen a laundry list of their respective back catalogues trouble the Top 10 on all of the major platforms, with one of the weakest efforts from Butler’s filmography the latest to resurface on Netflix, as per FlixPatrol.
The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide showed that star-powered submarine stories can be fantastic if executed well, but even the combination of Butler and Gary Oldman isn’t enough to save Hunter Killer from being almost aggressively mediocre.
Butler’s American captain is on the hunt for a sub in distress, where he stumbles upon a secret political coup, forcing him and his crew into action as they assemble an elite group of operatives to rescue the kidnapped Russian president and avoid World War III. A 37% Rotten Tomatoes score and a dismal $31 million box office haul is entirely befitting of Hunter Killer‘s status as a bland an uninspired spin on a setup we’ve seen done plenty of times before, and ten times better.