A 2017 Jackie Chan And Pierce Brosnan Thriller Is Lighting Up Netflix Charts
Netflix isn't just churning out new movies and TV shows with alarming regularity, the streamer is also re-churning old media and, more often than not, proving we'll watch anything. "The Foreigner," which is currently making a nice little run up the Netflix charts in the U.S., might actually be worth a look, though.
Based on Stephen Leather's 1992 novel "The Chinaman," the film re-teamed director Martin Campbell with former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan, 22 years after they worked together on 1995's "GoldenEye." But Brosnan certainly isn't fighting for Queen and Country in this action thriller, which sees Jackie Chan's Quan Ngoc Minh embark on a mission for revenge after his teenage daughter is killed in the bombing of Quan's London restaurant. Of course, Quan isn't just a restaurateur — he's a former Vietnam War special operations soldier more than ready to avenge his late daughter.
Brosnan plays Liam Hennessy, the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and member of the Sinn Féin political party. Hennessy's former affiliation with the IRA makes him a questionable figure in this action thriller, which was originally released on Netflix in the UK back in December 2017, and became a hit on the English version of the streamer in 2018. "The Foreigner" was released earlier in Chan's native China, hitting theaters in September 2017, while the U.S. saw the film debut in October of that year. Overall, the movie made a global total of $145 million on a budget of $35 million.
In terms of its domestic box office, "The Foreigner" basically made its budget back, which means a lot of potential viewers Stateside declined the offer of seeing Chan and Brosnan do their thing back in 2017. That at least partly explains why, six years later, everyone's apparently streaming the film.
A slow and steady climb
"The Foreigner" hit Netflix in the U.S. on September 23, 2023, debuting in the number seven spot for films as soon as it dropped. According to FlixPatrol, a site that aggregates Netflix viewing data, viewers in the U.S. have continued to stream the movie since, pushing it up the charts to number six as of September 25, following a brief drop to number nine on the previous day. At the time of writing, "The Foreigner" sits at number four on the Netflix home page, suggesting we could conceivably see Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan's thriller hit the number one spot in the U.S. on Netflix this week.
Which wouldn't be a bad thing. Not only did the movie make a respectable profit at the global box office, the film's actually not too bad. Its 66% RT score is a heck of a lot better than that for the Spanish slasher that recently climbed the Netflix charts. It's also a noteworthy entry in Chan's filmography for being a time where he eschewed the elaborate acrobatics that have defined his action career thus far. As Martin Campbell once told /Film:
"I was quite tough on him, in terms I wanted to keep the old man feel about him [...] I kept the action all within the military if you know what I mean. I wanted it to be military. I didn't want any of his tricks or any of his dropping ladders over the heads of waiters."
So, amid the ongoing deluge of film and TV choices, why not make some time to join the hordes and give "The Foreigner" a go?