TOP 10 MIND-BLOWING MOVIES THAT ROCKED THE WORLD IN 2021

By Blessing Agunloye

The streaming service continued to prove itself as a force to be reckoned with this year. Several movies were released, making their way into Netflix's most-watched of all-time rankings. In September, the Squid game overtook the 2020 series Bridgerton to become the streamer's most-watched title ever.

Below are the top 10 most-watched movies released in 2021.

10) KING OF BOYS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

The original king of boys movie came on Netflix in 2018. The movie was directed by Kemi Adetiba, now has a sequel that begins streaming on 27th August 2021. It tells the story of a businesswoman and philanthropist with her bright political future. Kemi Adetiba’s surprise 2017 box office mega-hit King of Boys is back. After the film’s runaway success, Netflix commissioned a sequel: a seven-part limited series, the streaming platform’s first from Nigeria. The small screen works as a more appropriate fit both for Adetiba’s notable propensity to embrace soapie dramatic excess and for the sheer breadth of the story she is telling.

The film was a treatise on the corruption of absolute power as told through the rise and fall of the protagonist, the instantly iconic Eniola Salami. The charismatic crime boss, played with manic glee by Sola Sobowale, has since become a fan favorite.

The Return of the King picks up five years after the events of the original. Salami, who fled the country to avoid prosecution for her crimes, returns to Nigeria as a free citizen. The first thing she does on arrival is announced she is running for governor in Lagos’s upcoming election. Her political ambition attracts more dangerous enemies, even as Salami faces the uphill task of reclaiming leadership of the underworld organization she used to lead.

She also finds herself alone, after the tragic loss of her children. She is then forced to face herself, perhaps for the first time in her life. The contradictions and hypocrisies that Salami finds within are filtered through the instincts of her younger self, who also functions as her explosive id. Alas, the actress (Toni Tones) who plays this role hams it up so recklessly that it is drained of any proper impact. Elsewhere, the other actors do not fare much better, doing what they can with paper-thin roles.

For Adetiba and her team, finding the appropriate medium for the project was one thing, knowing what to do with it is quite another. The Return of the King is occasionally visually interesting, with flashes of excitement erupting at intervals as it pays homage to the storytelling gusto of popular Nollywood films of the nineties. However, while the film at least had Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy as a guiding text, the Netflix series sets off on its adventure and struggles to spark the creative urgency needed to propel it across seven hours.

9) Money Heist

Money Heist, the crime drama heist thriller produced by writer-creator Alex Pina, follows the story of a team of eight thieves recruited by a criminal mastermind known only as "The Professor" who led one of the most elaborate heists recorded history. Originally intended as a limited series told In two parts, the popularity of Money Heist has spawned three seasons.

8) The Witcher

Netflix’s 2019 fantasy drama series The Witcher returns to the top 10 this week! Based on Andrzej Sapkowski's book series of the same name, the show follows the story of Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), a magically enhanced monster killer whose fate is intertwined with Princess Cirilla (Freya Allan) and a powerful enchantress named Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra). The highly anticipated second season of The Witcher is set to release this Friday, so it’s no surprise to see it pop up on this week’s list at number six as audiences try to refresh (or catch up) on what happened before the premiere.

7) Law Abiding Citizens

F. Gary Gray’s 2009 vigilante action thriller Law Abiding Citizen stars Gerard Butler (300) as Clyde Shelton, a man whose wife and daughter are murdered in a home invasion. Ten years after prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) cuts a deal with one of the killers in exchange for testimony, the killers are found dead and Shelton admits to murdering them. Imprisoned in jail and with nothing left to lose, Clyde offers Nick an ultimatum: release him, or witness more people around him die. Law Abiding Citizen was added to Netflix at the beginning of December, which explains why it’s on the Netflix top 10 this week at number seven.

6) Lost in Space

The third and final season of Lost in Space, which premiered earlier this month, follows Judy, Penny, Will Robinson, and their robot companion as they attempt to lead a group of young Colonists on an evacuation of the mysterious planet they’ve been stranded on for over a year. As their parents John and Maureen desperately attempt to reunite with them, they’ll have to face off against a terrifying alien threat the likes of which they’ve never encountered before.

The season projects “finale vibes” throughout and there’s the sense that anything can happen at any time, perhaps to a fault. The back half of the season feels like a marathon of climactic moments that could be the turning point of the story but then aren’t. The final episode alone has three such twists before ending on the one that’s the least visually interesting, and the attempt to give every lead character their shining moment of triumph within a limited time frame diminishes a bit from each. This is the only season that runs eight episodes instead of 10, and it’s possible that COVID-era production complications required the story’s final act to get compressed. While the path to the finish line is a bit jagged, the finale effectively hammers home each of the show’s overarching themes, namely the value of trust and the ability of each person (human or robot) to change their programming.

5) The Mitchells vs. The Machines

With The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller set new standards for visually and narratively inventive animated features, and they continue that hot streak with The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a wild tale of warfare between a family and a legion of robots controlled by an angry outdated AI (Olivia Coleman). This unlikely battle breaks out during the Mitchells’ cross-country trip to deliver wannabe-auteur Katie (Abbi Jacobson) to college, which itself is instigated by dad Rick (Danny McBride), who’s desperate to reconnect with his from-different-worlds girl. Father-daughter rifts are at the heart of writers/directors Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe’s adventure, which blends CGI, hand-drawn, and live-action material to create a zany rainbow-hued aesthetic that’s constantly surprising and inherently attuned to 21st-century online reality, where cartoons, memes, and DIY styles reign supreme. Aided by an expert voice cast and a script that piles on gags and one-liners with verve–highlighted by a showdown with a legion of evil Furbys–it’s a manic ode to accepting and embracing the future while retaining bonds with the past.

4) Thunder Force

"Thunder Force" takes place in current-day Chicago, where the citizens struggle in the aftermath of a 1983 cosmic-ray blast, which turned sociopaths and criminals into lethal villains wielding deadly superhero-like powers. They are called "Miscreants" by the cowed and helpless populace. The Miscreants have wreaked havoc ever since, and regular human beings are powerless to stop them. Lydia (Melissa McCarthy) and Emily (Octavia Spencer), best friends in grade school and then estranged for many years, team up to combat the Miscreants, using a genetic soup-formula developed by Emily over a painstaking years-long process, which can be injected into "regular" people, giving them superhero powers as well. Written and directed by Ben Falcone, "Thunder Force" is also a kind of genetic soup, a mish-mash of different genres: buddy comedies, buddy dramas, girl-power superhero movies. With such powerhouses as McCarthy and Spencer at the helm, it's a surprise that so much of the film is inert, rote, conventional.

2) Fatherhood

Fatherhood is a 2021 American comedy-drama film directed by Paul Weitz from a screenplay by Weitz and Dana Stevens, based on the 2011 memoir Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss and Love by Matthew Logelin. The film stars Kevin Hart, Alfre Woodard, Frankie R. Faison, Lil Rel Howery, DeWanda Wise, Anthony Carrigan, Melody Hurd, and Paul Reiser, and follows a new father who struggles to raise his daughter after the sudden death of his wife.

1) Squid Game

Squid Game is a South Korean television series streaming on Netflix. It is a survival drama Written and directed by Hwang Dong-Hyuk. The series, distributed by Netflix, was released worldwide on September 17, 2021, and has a count of 9 episodes.

The series revolves around Seong Gi-hun, a divorced and indebted chauffeur, who is invited to play a series of children’s games for a chance to earn a large cash prize. When he accepts the offer, he is taken to an unknown location where he finds himself among 455 other players who are also deeply in debt.

The players are made to wear green tracksuits and are kept under watch at all times by masked guards in pink jumpsuits. The games are overseen by the Front Man, who wears a black mask and black uniform. The players soon discover that losing the games results in their death, with each death adding 100 million to the potential 45.6 billion grand prizes. Gi-hun allies with other players, including his childhood friend Cho Sang-woo, to try to survive the physical and psychological twists of the games.

Other movies or TV series you should check out include No Time To Die, Spiderman: No Way Home, House of Gucci, A Naija Christmas, Army of Thieves, Cruella, Dune, Judas and The Black Messiah, among others.

Which of these movies do you have watched? Which one was your favorite? Let's know in the comment section.