Netflix’s Pornhub Documentary Panned By Critic: “Superficial Exposé” With “Little Depth”
As expected, the upcoming Pornhub documentary Money Shot from Netflix is a flop (there are a few exceptions, but Netflix content is almost always crap; it’s the place where bad movies that couldn’t get mainstream/widespread distribution always end up). In a review for DailyBeast, critic Nick Schager writes:
Netflix tries to steal back some eyeballs from one of its biggest online video-streaming competitors with Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, a documentary about the creation and travails of the internet’s pre-eminent X-rated emporium. Viewers hoping for salaciousness or titillation, however, will be sorely disappointed by Suzanne Hillinger’s feature (March 15), which eschews nudity (much less hardcore material) to an almost disingenuous degree in favor of a skin-deep and saggy look at the 21st-century porn wars.
[…]
Director Hillinger raises these topics from what feels like a distance; though she chats with a handful of relevant players on both sides of the Pornhub divide, there’s little depth to her inquiry.
[…]
Further complicating one’s reaction to Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is a pervasive sense of dishonesty. NCOSE senior counsel Dani Pinter comes across as intently committed to underplaying (if not outright concealing) her organization’s religious underpinnings, thereby calling into question their true motives. The proceedings’ primarily non-explicit depiction of professional porn is similarly misleading, epitomized by footage of Dahl making cutesy penis-review videos and chatting chastely with two co-stars on camera about what turns them on (their answers: “sensual making out” and “kissing”). Refusing to provide an accurate and trustworthy snapshot of what both these opposing factions are really about, the film comes across as a superficial exposé afraid of getting dirty.
Full review here.
