As the old saying goes, there’s no accounting for taste, and Netflix’s 200 million subscribers have regularly caused forgotten titles, terrible films and major box office flops to find a new lease of life on the world’s most popular streaming service. The critical and commercial reactions don’t matter in the slightest, and it’s impossible to try and guess which overlooked efforts will manage to make a dent on the platform given how unpredictable the selections continue to be.
The latest to cause an unexpected splash on Netflix is The Whole Truth, a legal drama starring Keanu Reeves that failed to even earn $2 million during its initial theatrical run in the fall of 2016, while Rotten Tomatoes has it ranked at a decidedly uninspiring 30%. However, the enduring popularity of the leading man has seen the movie remain entrenched in the Top 10 most-watched films list for roughly an entire week now.
Panned thriller The Woman in the Window, dismal sci-fi sequel Men in Black: International and Colin Farrell’s derivative crime story Dead Man Down have all been troubling the most-watched charts over the last seven days in numerous countries around the world, and there’s always guaranteed to be at least one inexplicably random entry at any given point in time, with The Whole Truth taking that spot now.
Keanu Reeves plays a defense attorney who inherits a case trying to get his 17 year-old client acquitted for killing his father, and ends up enlisting a young lawyer to help him crack it open, so it’s not even as if the logline promises any sort of originality or fresh spins on a genre that’s been done to death a thousand times over already. But Netflix customers clearly know what they want, and in this case it’s Keanu solving a murder.