Hugh Jackman’s Funniest Film Is Now On Netflix
Flushed Away is the #4 most streamed movie on Netflix.
Hugh Jackman may be best known as the no-nonsense mutant hero Wolverine in Marvel’s X-Men franchise, but the Oscar-nominated star has a funny side as well. That more playful Jackman was on rare display in the 2006 animated feature Flushed Away, in which the Aussie voices a spoiled uptown rat who finds himself beneath London’s sewers. The comedy didn’t exactly rake in the dough upon release, but it’s getting a lot more love right now as the #4 streamed movie on Netflix.
Roddy (Hugh Jackman) is a lonely but pretty comfortable pet rat living with a wealthy family until one day, when the family is away, the sewer rat Sid (Shane Richie) finds his way into the luxury apartment. Not happy about another rat intruding on his space, Roddy tries to flush Sid down the toilet only to wind up flushed himself. Trapped in the sewers below London, the pampered pet rat finds himself face-to-face with city of Ratropolis.
His only lead on a way back home is word of Rita Malone (Kate Winslet), a rat who might be able to get him back to the surface with her boat the Jammy Dodger. Hugh Jackman’s rodent hero manages to find Rita, but soon the pair are captured by the hench-rats of The Toad (Ian McKellen), a powerful Ratropolis bad guy who has an old bone to pick with all rats everywhere.
Produced by the same animation studio that gave us 2000’s Chicken Run and 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Flushed Away did well with the reviewers judging by its 73% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately, good reviews don’t always translate into good ticket sales, and Flushed Away‘s opening weekend found it competing against Borat and The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause. At the end of its theatrical run it had made $178 million against a $149 million budget.
But the good news for Hugh Jackman’s animated comedy is that when you’re streaming on Netflix, it doesn’t matter what you made in the box office. Enough subscribers are streaming the ratty adventure to earn it the #4 streamed spot — between the new Netflix documentary Pamela: A Love Story and the 2018 Icelandic thriller Arctic starring Mads Mikkelsen of Hannibal fame.
Hugh Jackman isn’t alone in the A-list voice talent appearing in Flushed Away. Along with the talent already mentioned, Jean Reno (Leon: The Professional) voices the dangerous Le Frog, Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) is The Toad’s hench-rat Spike, Bill Nighy (Love Actually) as the hench-rat Whitey, and Miriam Margolyes (The Age of Innocence) as Rita’s grandma.
To find out yourself if you think all of those voices deliver the funniest Hugh Jackman movie ever, you can watch Flushed Away which is streaming on Netflix right now.
