The crime thriller in all of its various guises has always been a reliable source of viewership for Netflix, whether the streaming service is capitalizing on pre-existing titles or churning out a raft of originals, so it’s no surprise to see Gold Brick plotting a heist of its own at the top of the charts.
Per FlixPatrol, the French caper has settled nicely onto the Top 10 in 32 countries around the world, and currently sits as the fifth top-viewed feature around the world. That’s not a bad return for a film that’s been greeted solidly rather than spectacularly by critics, but sometimes there’s no harm in sticking to an established formula if it’s handled with the requisite style and panache.
The plot revolves around a factory worker disillusioned with being paid so little while his employer rolls around in mountainous amounts of profits, so he concocts a scheme to begin surreptitiously ferrying luxury perfumes from right under the nose of his boss in order to create a lucrative – and entirely illegal – sideline of his own.
There isn’t anything in Gold Brick that you haven’t seen before from a light-hearted and infectiously enthusiastic workplace crime story that finds the put-upon employees deciding to take the power back and stick it to the man, but in this familiarity hasn’t bred anything close to contempt.
The genre smorgasbord that is Netflix will always be populating the library with tales of every flavor, but as Gold Brick‘s performance has made perfectly clear so far this week, sometimes you simply can’t beat the classics.