From Vulture: Every Netflix Original Movie, Ranked – O’Dowd Appears in Two on the List, and the Reviewer is Not Impressed with the Films
Chris O’Dowd appeared in at least two of the movies on this list – and this is largely a negative list. The guy who put it together is not impressed with many of these Netflix movies.
The film “Cloverfield Paradox” makes it to Vulture’s list at number 96 – O’Dowd had a role in that. O’Dowd was also in the film “The Incredible Jessica James,” which appears on the list at number 62.
I’ve already mentioned on this blog a few times the issues I take with O’Dowd (such as here, here, here, here, and here – among other posts), and I also have a longer post where I’ve critiqued most of his movies to date.
O’Dowd said in an interview once that after his role in “Bridemaids’ – which was both a quality role and a pretty good film – that he was offered a selection of mediocre romantic comedy roles, which he turned down.
Big mistake.
O’Dowd went on to reject mediocre rom coms (movies which I, and many others, find okay to watch) for really hideous, awful, stupid or vulgar movies in which he plays completely unappealing, tacky, or vulgar characters.
O’Dowd should have skipped those Z-grade, poor quality movies and taken the rom com roles. A mediocre rom com beats a cruddy, poorly made Grade-Z horror or comedy film any day of the week.
In mathematical notation of sorts:
Second Grade Rom Com Movie > (greater than) Lousy Movie
Why would an actor make the horrible decision to reject appearing in mediocre, yet serviceable, enjoyable rom com movies, to appear in Grade-Z level dreck that nobody liked and/or that went straight to NetFlix?
O’Dowd had a built-in fan base with women such as myself at one point, who enjoyed the hell out of his Rhodes character in Bridesmaids, but totally blew that capital on choosing to appear in these awful movies, and by behaving like a crass or condescending jerk, in interviews or on social media. Totally blew it.
Every Netflix Original Movie, Ranked
Excerpts:
This post was originally published in November 2017. We have updated it with Netflix’s recent offerings.
Netflix has spent the last few years and several billions of dollars on a crusade to be taken more seriously.
The online video-streaming platform first got some hair on its virtual chest in September 2013, when it racked up a whopping 14 Emmy nominations in its first year of eligibility, minting House of Cards as a bona fide contender and proving once and for all that computer-native programming was here to stay.
Still, though, content head Ted Sarandos felt there was something left to prove.
While the evolving service figured out what to do with the pair of serialized hits that had fallen in its lap (Orange Is the New Black had also emerged as must-see programming, despite missing that year’s Emmy cutoff by a nose), Sarandos was casting his gaze on a new, more hostile horizon.
TV was Netflix’s lingua franca; the service had always been geared to the smallness and bingeability — a word Netflix ushered into the public lexicon — of the format. Mastering the multiplex, however, would prove a far bitterer ground war.
Since it began branding its logo on original films in 2015, Netflix’s primary goal has been to divorce itself from the “digital dollar bin” reputation it established upon first pivoting from the snail-mail service, now an unsettlingly faint memory, to streaming….
…These days, Netflix is made up of a fair amount of movies that attain mere forgettability instead of outright awfulness. But it’s produced some genuinely good films, as well. Below, we attempt to rank every single Netflix original movie ever made (excluding documentaries, in the interest of this list remaining … bingeable).
..62. The Incredible Jessica James
Perhaps the Sundanciest of all Sundance movies, James Strouse’s pedestal for former Daily Show truth-bomber Jessica Williams ticks all the requisite boxes on the “indie breakout” checklist: a comic talent from TV trying their hand with a little drama, the quarter-life-crisis getting-your-shit-together arc, the adoring photography of the Brooklyn setting, music that’s cool but not so cool that the score sounds like it’s trying too hard or anything.
While Insecure and Issa Rae hold the game down on the opposite coast, Williams explores the travails of Tindering while young, black, and fabulous — but as she grows weary of the deadening repetition of dating, so too does her film follow a schematic that’s a little too familiar.
96. The Cloverfield Paradox
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the viewership of Super Bowl LII to watch this movie.
Turns out all the hubbub over the zero-warning release was all compensation — for a plot cobbled together from no fewer than four classics, for cut-rate production values suggesting the producers set most of their $45 million budget on fire, and perhaps the most cynical, mercenary approach to connected-universe franchising yet.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw does her best as an astronaut mourning the death of her children (would you believe that comes up later on in the film?) as she and her colleagues inadvertently shoot themselves into an unpredictable parallel dimension.
A handful of nifty set pieces get kneecapped by technical shortcomings, and the big reveal as to what the hell this all has to do with Cloverfield is so cheap, so manipulative, and so nihilistic that it could have come from one of the latter seasons of The Walking Dead.
((( end of excerpts )))
I would’ve much rather seen O’Dowd take on several Rhodes-like characters in average quality Romantic Comedy movies than to sit through films where he acts like an obscene cad, tries to rape a woman, or kills a pet pig.
O’Dowd really squandered the momentum he got with the Bridesmaids movie. Never, ever pass up the opportunity to appear in ho-hum, average, middling rom com movies, because look what happens: you end up playing a sexist or crude jackass in movies so bad that no woman will want to see them. And apparently a lot of men didn’t like these other movies O’Dowd has been in, either.
See Also:
Actor Chris O’Dowd is a Great Big Jerk – Not Adorable, Not Nice, and No, Not Sexy
The Inconsistency of Actor Chris O’Dowd Regarding Religion – His 2017 Comments
Actor Chris O’Dowd’s Misunderstanding of Feminism and the ‘Bridesmaids’ Movie Annie Character
Buttered Popcorn 