The 2016 Bruce Willis Flop Defying Odds And Dominating Netflix's Top 10
It's December, and there's a Bruce Willis movie currently dominating Netflix's Top Ten. If your mind immediately went to the classic Christmas film Die Hard, good guess, but no. Though not the first Bruce Willis flick to take over Netflix this year, 2016's crime thriller Marauders has leapt to the number seven spot in movies today, despite its poor reviews from four years ago.
Marauders unravels the mystery of a series of expertly executed bank heists that seem to be about more than just the money. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit actor Christopher Meloni plays the FBI agent investigating the case, while Bruce Willis is the rich, shady owner of the targeted banks. Entourage's Adrian Grenier and Guardians of the Galaxy's Dave Bautista play supporting FBI agents as the complex plot unfolds.
Marauders didn't impress critics
Unfortunately, when Marauders was first released, critics griped about its convoluted story. David Ehrlich of IndieWire wrote, "Marauders manages to be at once both agonizingly generic and completely insane."
This conflict between its unoriginal structure and overly complicated script is a common complaint amongst reviewers. As Alex McLevy of The A.V. Club argued, "Interspersed with some well-done robbery set pieces, the film as a whole strives for unearned depth, dropping an entire thesis about the nature of legality and ethics into a straightforward crime flick, thereby making the latter elements needlessly confusing while the former get watered down into lackadaisical platitudes."
While Ehrlich didn't have much good to say about Willis' performance, remarking that his indifference "contaminates every other scene in the film, reducing a marginally interesting thriller into an epochal statement of creative detachment," he's apparently attracting enough curious Netflix watchers to bring new life to this forgotten film. And since Marauders is new to Netflix, there must be some level of novelty driving it up the Top Ten chart.
Marauders is neither the best nor the worst Bruce Willis movie, but if you're cruising the streaming site for a Die Hard fix, this film probably won't scratch that itch. It's better left as a turn-off-your-brain-and-turn-up-the-action flick you can load up on Netflix to unwind after a long day.