A woefully empty-headed action thriller follows the money all the way to the Netflix Top 10

It’s about the most backhanded of compliments you could possibly give a B-tier action thriller that never saw the inside of a theater, but Nicolas Cage has definitely starred in far worse than Running with the Devil.

Naturally, that doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the film itself, but the actor’s career choices over the last decade. Respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 24 and 37 percent from critics and audiences are poor, but nowhere near the bottom of the barrel for the Academy Award winner. In fact, it wasn’t even the worst-reviewed 2019 movie he appeared in, with Kill Chain, A Score to Settle, and Grand Isle all faring worse.

None of the characters are given names throughout the running time, which makes sense because you won’t care who any of them are, or why they’re doing what they do. A federal agent is on the trail of an infamous cabal of cocaine dealers, tracing their movements from the plantations right up the supply chain to corrupt officials profiting on the drug trade.

Cage’s The Cook, Laurence Fishburne’s The Man, and Leslie Bibb’s Agent in Charge head up the one-note cast in an entirely forgettable shooter that has nonetheless managed to do what countless other titles of its ilk have accomplished in the past – by becoming one of the most popular movies on Netflix.

As per FlixPatrol, Running with the Devil has crashed right into the Top 10 in 19 countries split across two continents, returning to prominence in style as one of the platform’s top-viewed releases of the week so far. No Cage Rage, but evidently plenty of adulation from the eccentric actor’s fans.