Maybe Netflix will stop making bad action movies if subscribers give up on watching them, but looking at how Jennifer Lopez’s interminable The Mother has been performing since landing on the content library, it’s not an outcome that anybody should prepare themselves for.
Securing the wrong kind of couple goals by releasing equally panned action thrillers on the exact same day, J-Lo at least has bragging rights after her ass-kicking adventure cracked Netflix’s all-time Top 10, whereas husband Ben Affleck’s Hypnotic was left to die a painful death at the box office and be shuffled onto digital and on-demand in a matter of weeks.
Boasting a resolutely mediocre Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 43 percent, Niki Caro’s formulaic shoot ’em up finds Lopez coming back out of retirement and exile to protect the daughter she’d abandoned in the name of her own safety. It isn’t great, but it’s exactly the sort of thing you can put on in the background while you go about your daily business, something that applies to far too many of Netflix’s in-house exclusives.
And yet, The Mother has seen fit to overtake Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Sandra Bullock’s The Unforgivable, and questionable romance Purple Hearts to become the eighth top-viewed film in Netflix’s history after racking up 229 million viewing hours and counting. There are plenty of great actioners available at the push of a button on the service, but it would be very fair to say that the ones funded by Hollywood don’t often tend to rank among them.
