Most people know that, at its best, Netflix is capable of producing some truly great movies. Some of those movies have gone on to tremendous critical acclaim, and a few have even come close to winning the top prize at the Academy Awards.
For every great movie that Netflix produces, though, the studio also seems to find a way to produce at least as many complete stinkers. These are six of the worst movies that Netflix has made since it started producing totally original projects.
You had to know at least one Adam Sandler comedy was going to come up on this list, right? Sandler has been in some great movies in recent years, but he’s also made some outright clunkers that rather conveniently also double as nice vacations for him and his closest friends.
Telling the story of two friends who decide to fake their own deaths to start over with new lives, the movie morphs into a strange action thriller as it develops. The worst thing about it, though, is that it is lazy and unfunny, and even Sandler can’t do anything to overcome that.
A bizarrely high concept sci-fi thriller that contains almost no thrills, The Last Days of American Crime is disappointing both in theory and in execution.
Telling the story of a group of criminals who are trying to execute one last heist before the government brainwashes citizens to make crime impossible, this movie is not even as weird as that premise might make it sound. Instead, it feels completely rote from the word go, and like the kind of big-budget action movie that completely lacks a reason for existing.
Although Netflix ventures into the prestige movie game with some regularity, not every movie it finances for the purpose of winning awards actually manages to do so.
Unfortunately, some of them wind up like The Last Thing He Wanted, which features an all-star cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, and Willem Defoe, but is almost entirely unsuccessful. The film follows a reporter who risks everything to broker an arms deal for her ailing father. Most viewers found the movie generally confounding and largely uninteresting, in spite of the inventive choices it occasionally makes.
Another out-and-out bomb that came from the earliest days of Sandler’s collaboration with Netflix, The Ridiculous 6 is meant to be a riff on The Magnificent Seven, but it fails to be that on almost every imaginable level.
The film does feature an interesting and surprising supporting cast, and some decent production values, but none of that makes up for the laziness of the script, and the feeling that Sandler is mostly sleepwalking through his work in the film. Not all of his comedies with Netflix landed with this much of a thud, but The Ridiculous 6 is few people’s idea of a good time.
Few actors have a more mixed track record than Jared Leto, who has starred in what feels like an overwhelming number of outright bombs over the course of his career. One of the more unloved movies of Leto’s career is The Outsider, which tells the story of an American soldier who stays in Japan after World War II and begins working his way up the ranks of the Yakuza crime syndicate.
It’s as uninvolving and problematic as that description makes it sound, and the only thing Leto seems to be firmly committed to in his central performance is making the weirdest choice possible at every turn.
Marlon Wayans has made some genuinely hilarious movies over the course of his career, but Naked is unfortunately not one of them. The film employs a Groundhog Day-like structure to tell the story of a man who keeps waking up naked in an elevator on his wedding day.
Although living the same day over and over again can lead to great comedy, it doesn’t here, and Naked fails to commit to its premise in the way it would need to in order to be worth watching.
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