So far this has not been a great year for Netflix original movies. Sure, they invested big on the second on Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon series but that was not money well spent. They also made Spaceman, another film off the back of their contract with Adam Sandler that somehow continues to make him the highest paid actor in Hollywood, and while it thankfully wasn’t another of his risible comedies it still wasn’t great. Hopes are high for Richard Linklater’s Hitman in a couple of weeks time and for Beverley Hills Cop: Axel F later in the Summer but based on the last five months we have come a long way from when they were the most successful studio at the 2021 Oscars. Frankly the quality has been more akin to what we used to expect from Netflix before the streaming revolution laid the poor reputation of ‘straight to web/DVD/video’ movies to rest.

Nowhere is this mediocrity more evident than in Mother of the Bride, a film for which being labelled mediocre is more than it deserves. This romcom sees warring middle age exes reunite for their children’s wedding in a beautiful Southeastern Asian beach resort and if that sounds a lot like 2022’s Ticket to Paradise then you’d be right but again you are aiming too high with the comparison. That movie was corny in the extreme but it was carried by the incredible charisma of Julia Roberts and George Clooney. I suppose you could argue that Benjamin Bratt is a poor man’s Clooney of sorts (they have both starred opposite Sandra Bullock after all) but Brooke Shields does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Julia Roberts. Shields has been good in the past and congratulations to her for just being elected as president of the Actors’ Equity Association but her appearance in this is terrible. Bratt seems relaxed enough but Shields’ performance is painfully laboured and both are underserved but a humourless and unoriginal script. Miranda Cosgrove is in there too, trying to work out what the next stage of her career should be but she needs a better agent. From the title it sounds like some kind of gender flipped version of Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride films and while that would be an awful idea, I wish that’s what it was. As it is, it is like being trapped immobile watching the holiday snaps of complete strangers for ninety minutes, only way more tedious.

Atlas is better but is still both derivative and inferior to a lot of real studio movies. Here we are once again in a future world where robots have gone rogue and are battling humanity for supremacy of the planet. This was a tired idea when The Creator came out last year but there director Gareth Edwards showed how you could do something different, timely and poetic with it. Atlas has nothing new to offer at all. It really is as though some junior exec at Netflix said they needed a cheap fiftysomethings abroad movie and a quick script about AI and these two were immediately greenlit while the real players at the studio were out there courting Linklater and Eddie Murphy.

Unlike Mother of the Bride though, Atlas does have some good performances. Sterling K. Brown and Mark Strong are both great as the military men who bring our hero into the field when they suddenly have a chance to take out the one evil android who is the mastermind behind humanity’s destruction. (This incidentally, shows no understanding of how computer intelligence works forty years after The Terminator totally understood that this is not how computer intelligence works). Atlas herself though (weak name for this woman, weak name for this film) is played by Jennifer Lopez. Oddly for most of the time she is apparently acting while sitting in the same small enclosed space as she pilots a neural linked mechanical suit. Imagine almost a whole movie of those shots of Tony Stark inside his helmet and you won’t be far off. Filming it must have involved spending hours in a small green screen storage container.

Still though, Lopez is excellent. She manages to be highly engaging despite the confines of both the area she is in and the plot. Her technophobic analyst also develops a nice rapport with the voice interface in her battle bot and while we don’t come to feel for this habitually hearty HAL as much as the filmmakers clearly want us to, the two do make good company. I just wish it was in a better movie.

Ultimately then, if you’ve got other streaming services I would say go to those. Amazon has Zone of Interest and American Fiction and Disney+ has Poor Things and All of Us Strangers so what are you looking here for. Maybe try Netflix again here in June.