The largest streaming service in the world is necessarily packed to the brim with so much content that not all of it can be up to par. Of 156 original films released by Netflix, five stood out as being some of the worst received, according to Rotten Tomatoes' Critic Scores.
Netflix originals come from all around the world, in dozens of languages and with hundreds of artistic lenses. What's truly stunning about the Netflix model is the sheer variety of what they bring to the screen. Unfortunately, with ambition comes failure, so inevitably, a substantial percentage will fail for a variety of reasons. Though the critical reviews are a more respected ranking, special commendations should go to Father Christmas Is Back, which is not currently on the Tomatometer, but does have the year's worst audience score at a brutal 8%.
Thunder Force (21%)
This superhero comedy carelessly wastes a solid cast on a terrible script. This is less a parody of superhero films and more of a straight comic book-esque action cinema that attempts to have more frequent jokes. Like many of Melissa McCarthy's worst films, Thunder Force relies almost entirely on tired slapstick and gross-out comedy.
The script, courtesy of McCarthy's husband Ben Falcone, is extremely generic. There's basically nothing special about the story or characters. Octavia Spencer attempts to play straight against McCarthy's silly, but that leaves her character very little air. She's trying her best and delivering a decent performance, but in dialogue and action, she winds up stuck in the background. A dull, lifeless, generic comedy that appeals only to McCarthy superfans, Thunder Force really earns its critical derision.
Madame Claude (20%)
A heavily dramatized French biopic about a famed brothel owner, which amounts to little more than aimless sex scenes and halfhearted beauty shots of Paris. The high point of the film is the performances, especially Garance Marillier, fantastic up-and-coming star of Raw and Titane, who does great work with this shoddy material. The life of Madame Claude has been adapted to film before, in 1977's The French Woman, which is only a bit better received.
It is unavoidably clear what the goal of this film is, but it falls flat due to a complete lack of substance. The cinematography is weak in a film that could really use some dynamic visuals, the script is constantly telling the audience things it should be showing, and the plot feels detached and messy. There is some enjoyment to be derived in Madame Claude, but it fails to build itself atop anything meaningful, resulting in a forgettable jaunt through sixties Paris.
Squared Love (20%)
This Polish romantic comedy is an almost comical mishap of tropes and cliches which feel woefully out of its era. Its main characters are both living double lives; half modeling professionally and half living normal lives. The female lead is a dedicated teacher who must also work as a model, under an assumed name, to pay off her father's tremendous debt. The male lead is an unapologetic womanizer who meets both of her identities separately and thinks he's dating both.
The pair (trio?) are inexorably drawn together with a dozen or so roadblocks tossed out to complicate the obvious ending. The film has all the complexity of the average Hallmark Original, with the added bonus of being generally incompetent and centering entirely on unlikeable main characters. Advisable only to rom-com addicts, but even casual fans of the genre could call every plot point before the thirty-minute mark.
Carnaval (17%)
Four women go to Salvador, Brazil for the yearly Carnival celebration, to meet boys, have fun and achieve social media fame. So that's the plot out of the way, unfortunately, this Brazilian comedy finds a way to make one of the planet's most famous parties boring. The four leads are arch stereotypes; the influencer, the nerd, the hot one, and the nice girl. They are each indistinguishable from those archetypes in every other movie aimed at the same age group, making them either dull or annoying.
The plot boils down to the four leads learning to reduce whichever character trait the script has decided is their issue. There's truly nothing going on here, anyone with a deep interest in the subject matter would get a much better experience from a travel documentary about the area.
The Girl on the Train (9%)
An adaptation of the 2015 Paula Hawkins novel of the same name, which has already made it to the big screen in 2016, The Girl on the Train is an Indian recreation of this popular story. Unfortunately, this version is plagued by terrible acting, incomprehensible plot, generic visuals, and abysmal writing. The dialogue has been described as faux-poetic, if not a little pretentious.
The film feels completely standard issue, with a strong emphasis on manufactured melodrama to trick the audience into feeling something. It's an outright failure, turning the fastest-selling adult hardcover novel ever written into a sub-par soap opera. It's almost impressive what this film gets wrong, resulting in an almost impressively negative score.