I’ll argue that it is as difficult to create a mindless action movie than it is to produce some high-prestige drama. There is something magical when you find a dumb action movie that takes you away from the worries of the world for a couple of hours.

But that type of movie is more difficult to build than you might expect. You need plenty of suspenseful action, interspersed with just enough backstory to provide some stakes for the characters. You don’t need to provide a detailed explanation of motivations and backstory of the monsters or the bad guys. There has to just be enough there for everything to hang together.

There are some dumb action movies so magnificently insane that I’ll rewatch them any time I have the chance (Battleship), but the majority of my favorites are ones than I enjoyed the first time around, but probably will never bother with again.

The new Netflix original film The Last House falls into that category. It was a fun watch. But like a Jagermeister hangover, I probably don’t need to experience it again.

Rather than attempting to provide my own review, let me pass along this logline from Netflix, which honestly tells you everything you need to know about the film:

And honestly, what else do you need to know about the film?

If you are a fan of movies such as this one, Netflix has been cranking out an impressive string of mid-budget, often distinctive original action films for years. And they frequently star actors who might have a difficult time persuading a traditional studio to greenlight their action movie.

I don’t know that anyone would tap Allison Janney to play a bad-ass, aging CIA agent. But she does just that in the 2022 Netflix original film Lou, where she plays a woman tracking a former Green Beret who had kidnapped her neighbor’s daughter. It’s an aggressively unglamorous role that she embraces as she exhibits a scary level of violence.

And while much of the filmography of Jennifer Lopez is disappointing, her emotionally distant, ice queen on-camera persona works very well in an action movie. In 2023’s The Mother, she plays a female assassin comes out of hiding to protect the daughter that she gave up years before. Her character is magnificently unlikeable in the film, but it’s a flurry of action and she exhibits some real evolution over the two hours.

In 2024’s Atlas, Lopez plays Atlas Shepherd, “a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past. But when plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it.” The premise is clunky and often nonsensical and the film seems to find a lot of reasons for Lopez to be simultaneously sweaty and wearing little more than a tight t-shirt. But it is also prime dumb action movie.

It might be strange to describe a high-budget movie starring Ryan Reynolds, Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner as a dumb action movie, but 2022's The Adam Project has it all. Inexplicable time travel, villains who are bad apparently because the film needs to be and some plot points that can only be described as "clunky."

But it's also a film where Ryan Reynolds gets to be Ryan Reynolds. There is even a kid version of Reynolds and a few brief scenes with Zoe Saldana. Unfortunately Jennifer Garner doesn't get a lot to do, which makes me wish someone would cast her as a middle-aged retired killer. The movie also has some nice things to say about fatherhood, which is a nice bonus.

And I haven’t touched on the international action films. I highly recommend Kill Boksoon, which has just some insane action sequences. And the 2019 Filipino movie Maria, which has a pretty straight forward plot and an extremely minimal budget. But it’s a taut, nicely made example of kicking ass.

There are a number of reasons to criticize Netflix’s creative choices, and its track record on high budget, big stars films isn’t great. But no one cranks out so many wonderfully mindless action films as Netflix. And I couldn’t be happier about it.