High concept sci-fi has always been a fairly tough not to crack regardless of how much talent is involved on either side of the camera, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a massive disappointment when 2015’s Self/Less turned out to be as bad as it did.
Director Tarsem Singh has established himself as one of the most distinctive visual voices in the industry through the likes of The Cell, The Fall, and Immortals, so the prospect of having the singular filmmaker dive headlong into an action-packed thriller with a fascinating central premise was exciting stuff.
Then there’s the cast, which featured Ryan Reynolds in the lead role with support coming from Academy Award-winning legend Ben Kingsley, Matthew Goode, Michelle Dockery, Natalie Martinez and many more, all wrapped up in a storyline that sees Kingsley’s cancer-stricken billionaire transfer his consciousness into the body of Reynolds’ Damian in order to start a new life, only to discover that his new host has some deep and dark secrets that refuse to stay buried.
It sounds great, but seeing as Self/Less barely recouped its $26 million budget at the box office and secured a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 19 percent, calling it a misfire would be generous. That being said, big names and broad escapism is effectively bulletproof on Netflix at this point, so there shouldn’t be any jaws on the floor when discovering that FlixPatrol has named it as one of the platform’s most-watched titles on a global scale, even if it should have been so much better given the sum of its parts.