For a company that seems to have limitless amounts of cash at its disposal to hire the best and brightest talents has to offer with the promise of creative freedom, Netflix still can’t seem to master the art of making an above-average blockbuster movie, with The Mother exploding out of the blocks to become the platform’s number one movie.
Setting the wrong kind of couple goals, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck both saw their latest features release yesterday, and each of their action thrillers has conspired to take a critical pounding. On the plus side, the former’s The Mother is at least faring marginally better than the latter’s Hypnotic, even if a 44 percent Rotten Tomatoes score makes it the latest in a frustratingly long line of banal shoot ’em ups slapped with the Netflix branding.
As tends to be the case whenever the outfit parachutes an A-lister into a genre film, though, Whale Rider director Niki Caro’s latest has gunned down the top spot on the charts. Per FlixPatrol, The Mother hasn’t just debuted as the top-viewed feature on a global scale, but it’s done so by shooting straight to the summit in a staggering 79 countries around the world.
The recipe for a Netflix actioner seems to be a simple one; you take a household name and a proven director, partner them up for a formulaic story – in this case Lopez’s estranged ex-assassin trying to protect the daughter she gave up from her enemies – watch it be greeted with a shrug, before it tops the rankings and then gets forgotten about in a matter of weeks. Everyone watches it, nobody likes it, and then the cycle begins anew.
