The James Patterson Thriller Flop Getting A Second Chance On Hulu

"The Postcard Killings" features "The Walking Dead" star Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Jacob Kanon, an NYPD detective who's investigating the murder of his daughter and her husband after they were killed and sadistically posed in a gruesome, classical art-inspired tableau while on their honeymoon in Europe. Kanon, working on his own, figures out that other newlywed couples are being killed in similar ways in other European cities, which means there are serial killers on the loose. He begins working with an American journalist living in Sweden named Dessie Lombard (Cush Jumbo) to track down the killers and get justice for his daughter.

The film got negative reviews from critics — Looper named it one of the worst movies of 2020 — and it has a 24% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. Observer's Rex Reed described it as "a lurid, tasteless crime procedural" that's "more gruesome than I dare to describe." It hasn't performed much better with audiences, with a 37% audience score. "The Postcard Killings" was directed by Bosnian filmmaker Danis Tanović, who won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002 for "No Man's Land." "The Postcard Killings" is certainly not as good as that film, but Jeffrey Dean Morgan gives a committed performance, and there's some very slick cinematography that makes the movie look better than the average direct-to-VOD thriller. If you go into it with appropriate expectations, you won't be disappointed.