Netflix's new No. 1 movie is loved by streamers – but loathed by critics

The Man From Toronto is currently topping the Netflix UK movie charts and sitting at number two in its US charts. And that's interesting, because by most accounts it's awful.

The Man From Toronto's Rotten Tomatoes critic rating is a frankly terrible 25%, the usually much more forgiving audience rating is 42%, and its IMDb rating is a paltry 5.7 out of ten. Over on Google, the reviews are sitting at 3.6 out of five.

The film, which stars Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson, seems like a pretty standard action comedy. So why's it scoring so badly?

The Man From Toronto: what the critics say

The problem with the film is that it's "dreadfully unfunny", says the Daily Beast. Reelviews says it "feels like the cold leftovers of a meal I didn't much like in the first place", while Stuff.co.nz says "this really does feel like a poor facsimile of the hit action-comedies of the '90s like Lethal Weapon and Bad Boys." 

I've written before that sometimes Netflix feels to me like a small town video rental shop, the shelves packed primarily with straight-to-video movies made on a modest budget to provide the film equivalent of a cheeseburger on a Saturday night: pleasant enough but not particularly great or memorable. And the reviews suggest that this film is very much in that tradition, the kind of thing you'd rent because all the copies of Lethal Weapon are already out on loan.

Don't get me wrong. I love action comedies, but I think I'll give this a miss. Netflix has much better options: the utterly brilliant In Bruges, the aforementioned Bad Boys and The Adam Project are all brilliant Saturday night movies, and if you haven't already seen them – or haven't seen them in ages – they're definitely worth adding to your watch list.