OPINION: We all know that Netflix is pretty good at doing TV series. Its latest, Nobody Wants This, just launched to favourable reviews. What it can’t do as well, is movies.
There have been perfectly fine Netflix films in the last several years. I like watching The Dig, Hit-Man was a lot of fun (though technically Netflix bought that movie) but I honestly find myself struggling to think of another good Netflix movie I’ve watched in the past few years. That’s probably because I avoid most of them like the plague, or in the case of Rebel Moon, I’ve excised it from my memory.
Having heard the good reviews that surrounded Rebel Ridge, I decided to give that a watch, and while I don’t think it lived up to the hype, I did enjoy it. It’s not really a revenge-thriller of sorts, at least not in the traditional way, taking on the tropes of the Western genre but with very little blood-letting; and violence that was more tactical than bombastic. It was a nice change from the usual.
Netflix has wanted to disrupt the traditional methods of cinema and TV market for years, and arguably it has succeeded in changing the landscape – not necessarily for the better I’d say, but fewer people are going to cinema than there were before 2020. There are other options than just having to head to the local cinema and parking your butt there for a few hours.
Having been a religious cinemagoer, I now find myself being a bit more casual – not because I don’t like going to the cinema (my nearest Picturehouse is a good one), but because the quality of films seems to have gone down. I’d say in some cases it’s careering towards Netflix’s level of quality, and the fewer releases coming to the cinema since the Hollywood strikes in 2023 means there’s less of a reason to go.
But there’s also less of a reason to jump in and watch a Netflix Original Film because they have been notoriously weak in quality. There are lessons to be learnt from Rebel Ridge – the first is that it’s an interesting twist on a well ploughed genre, so while it follows the conventional twists and turns, it goes in unexpected directions too – it’s a film that’s not about violence but in neutralising it.
Then there’s the social aspect of it. The narrative of the police’s seizure powers in confiscating powers is not something you hear about too often. And then there’s the racial aspect of a black man against a mostly white police force, and the obvious politics that comes with that. Again, these are all things that mark it a little different from the usual fare; a film that has something if not to say, then to shed light on.
The problem I find with Netflix films is that they have very little to say, and almost feel as if someone gave up on it towards the end of production and Netflix just shuffled it on the platform so they can be done with it. For a company that seems to want to put the death nail in the coffin of cinema, it’s doing a really flimsy job of it.
But a film like Rebel Ridge, and to a different extent in Hit-Man, shows that small films that have been crafted and executed well are the ones that engage audiences and get people talking. Following the algorithm just leads to more of the same – that isn’t what Netflix needs. It’s the outliers, the films that rub against the grain like Rebel Ridge, that’ll start boosting the consistent and quality of its films.
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