Netflix Needs To Stop The Set Piece Slop

thegamer.com:

I'm not sure what's going on at Netflix. The streaming platform seems completely incapable of making a good movie. When it comes to TV, I don't think any streaming service is close. Amazon Prime has The Boys, and Disney+ has WandaVision and The Mandalorian, but these are blown away by Netflix's back catalogue. BoJack Horseman, Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things, Cobra Kai, The Umbrella Academy... the list just goes on and on. But its movies do not stack up. It fumbled its way to a Best Picture nomination for Don't Look Up, but the general consensus was that it was undeserved. Since then we've had The Man From Toronto, Persuasion, Spiderhead, and The Gray Man. Let's talk about that last one in particular.

The Gray Man is Netflix's 2022 action epic, just like Extraction, The Old Guard, Red Notice, and 6 Underground before it. If you've seen them, you’ve already seen this movie. It's reductive to say that all action movies are the same (Die Hard with a Vengeance is one of the greatest movies of all time), but Netflix doesn't just make action movies. It makes the most formulaic, by the numbers, star-powered but completely lacking a script of substance action movies. If it was churning out Die Hard with a Vengeances, or even Die Hard 2s, I'd be okay with it. But we're getting Die Hard 5s. We're getting Jack Reachers. We're getting all the action movie cliches thrown together. There's so much bullet spray and explosions that nothing matters. If something blows up in every scene, I no longer care about things being blown up.

Related: Haley Bennett Is The Most Important Thing In The Borderlands MovieThe hand-to-hand combat is the biggest let down. The Russos are directing this, and they can do so much better. The Winter