Mel Gibson’s ‘Hot Seat’ Is Now Streaming on Freevee

Top 10 after it was added to the platform earlier this month. Directed by James Cullen Bressack and starring Gibson alongside Kevin Dillon, the film was met with harsh reviews upon release, which makes its new-found success on streaming unexpected…but at the same time completely on trend for free streaming releases.

Hot Seat is a high-stakes hostage thriller, which centers on IT expert Orlando Friar (Dillon) who becomes an unwitting pawn in a dangerous cyber-heist. Forced to hack into government servers while trapped in a booby-trapped office chair rigged to explode (of course he is), Friar must race against the clock to outsmart the anonymous mastermind holding his life—and the city—hostage. Gibson appears as Wallace Reed, a bomb squad veteran determined to save Friar and the day.

Hot Seat only received a limited theatrical release in 2022, and didn’t make much of a splash in the theaters it did open in. With the consensus at the time being that Gibson’s involvement in a movie was reason enough for many to skip it, Hot Seat received the cold shoulder and vanished off the radar almost as soon as it arrived.

As if contending with a limited release was not enough of an uphill struggle, the film generated an 11% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, which did not exactly give anyone an incentive to spend their hard-earned money on a night out at the cinema. The film was soundly panned for its “underwhelming script,” “uninspired direction,” and, of course, the golden chestnut of action movie put downs, the fact that it plays by numbers to the letter of every action movie that has gone before it.

Mel Gibson Has Found an Audience on Free Streaming

When it comes to free streaming, none of that matters. Viewers are usually trawling a list of platforms, looking for something to pass a couple of hours, when, bam, up pops something they have either never heard of, something they remember from a long time ago, or something that just catches their eye with a big action-packed poster and synopsis. Although it is hard to work out which, Hot Seat has clearly tapped into at least one of these areas, otherwise there are just a lot of Mel Gibson supporters coming out in force to push this one to new chart heights.

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Once a Hollywood A-lister with award-winning directorial credits, Gibson in recent years has taken on some low-key projects as major studios distanced themselves from his often extreme and increasingly controversial views on many subjects. However, since Hot Seat was released, Gibson has made an appearance in the John Wick prequel series, The Continental, is planning a sequel to The Passion of the Christ (yes, yet more controversy awaits), and his new directorial effort, the Mark Wahlberg-starring Flight Risk, has been panned by everyone, but secured a big win at the box office in a tricky and low-volume couple of weeks.

Hot Seat is certainly not a movie that will gain Gibson any more fans, or even be appreciated by those he still has, but it does seem to be appealing to someone out there as it crawls its way up the Freevee chart to challenge a bunch of other free-to-stream second-chancers.

Hot Seat

Release Date

July 1, 2022

Runtime

87 minutes

Director

James Cullen Bressack

Writers

Leon Langford

Producers

George Furla, Ryan Black, Paul Luba, Gary Raskin, Gerry Pass, David Gendron, Michelle O’Reilly, Luke Taylor, Alastair Burlingham, Mark Stewart, Matthew Helderman, Phil Hunt, Chad Verdi Jr., Chad A. Verdi, Sean Patrick O’Reilly, Vance Owen, Compton Ross, Barry Brooker, Ali Jazayeri, Stan Wertlieb, Randall Emmett

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