Netflix subscribers evidently don’t care about the critical consensus in the slightest, which is just as well when plenty of entertaining, exciting or quite frankly insane genre movies tend be overlooked by snootier reviewers but widely embraced by audiences.
In the last several days alone, we’ve seen panned thriller The Woman in the Window, Ryan Reynolds’ risible comic book adaptation R.I.P.D., Fifty Shades of Grey, painfully mediocre DreamWorks animation Home, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Sabotage and more enter the Top 20 most-watched list, despite none of them boasting what you would call an encouraging reputation.
Having been lurking in the shadows for the last three months, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson’s Men in Black: International is now surging its way back up the charts to find a second life on Netflix, which would technically be its third overall. Or maybe not if you don’t count its theatrical run as a life at all, when it flopped at the box office and became the lowest-earning and worst-rated entry in the sci-fi buddy comedy series by quite some distance.
Liam Neeson is a man more that familiar with the upper echelons of the Netflix most-watched list, of course, while Hemsworth’s equally terrible Blackhat was proving inexplicably popular not too long ago, so you throw the pair of them together in a film and almost drown them in subpar visual effects and you’ve got yourself a Netflix smash hit.
The real question is how long it can stay on the chart when the makeup of the Top 20 can often change on a dime, but it’s impressive enough that Men in Black: International has somehow managed to persevere on the world’s biggest streaming service for so long.