Those Who Wish Me Dead
Warner Bros.
Netflix’s original movies have not exactly been burning down the house as of late, with features like The Whisper Man, The Secret Woman and The Last House being deeply unimpressive. The service’s best new movies have been licensed like Ready or Not, but now there’s a new one starring Angelina Jolie that’s racing up the top 10 list.
Those Who Wish Me Dead is a 2021 feature led by Angelina Jolie that is currently #2 on the list and hopefully about to pass the much worse Whisper Man. Jolie has been more picky about her movie roles lately, and 2021 was also the year she starred in the MCU’s infamous bomb, The Eternals. After that, she starred in Maria and Couture, but nothing past that, as of yet. Here’s the synopsis for Those Who Wish Me Dead:
“Oscar winner Jolie stars as Hannah, a smoke jumper still reeling from the loss of three lives she failed to save from a fire when she comes across a traumatized 12-year-old boy with nowhere else to turn.”
The film has a great cast that includes The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), and industry icon Tyler Perry. Throw in Game of Thrones’ Aiden Gillen, and you’ve got yourself quite an ensemble.
This is an example of fans liking a movie more than critics. Those Who Wish Me Dead has a 63% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics, fresh but not all that high, but a much better 86% from audiences, and clearly they are interested in the concept five years later as the movie moves up the Netflix charts. This is what I call “thumbnail appeal,” as if you see a little rectangle with Angelina Jolie’s face in front of a bunch of fire, that definitely seems like something you may want to check out. I think that’s also working in favor of The Whisper Man, with movie legend Robert De Niro in the box.
If you’d like to watch other Angelina Jolie movies on Netflix, there aren’t that many to choose from. One is 2024’s Maria, mentioned above, and The Good Shepard, starring Matt Damon. Unless I’m missing some, I can’t find any more, and that’s a pretty tiny sliver of her catalog. Jolie has done a number of other action movies over the years: Eternals, Salt, Wanted, and famously, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which caused quite a bit of real-life drama at the time. Also, who can forget her as the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft, a role she took all the way back in 2001. But 25 years later, here she is, still in the genre.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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