Husbands in Action is the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon—and forget soon after.

Name: Husbands in Action is the kind of movie you watch on a Sunday afternoon—and forget soon after.
Item: Maridos em Ação
Rating: 2
Author: Caio Coletti

The leads’ strong chemistry carries a film that leans more into comedy than action.

3 min read

Caio Coletti

Translated from Omelete BR

Updated on July 13, 2026, at 07:05 PM

Image credits: Scene of Husbands in Action (Reproduction)

Back in 2023, I wrote in my review of the Netflix action thriller The Mother about how the streamer seems to have specialized in making movies to fall asleep to on the couch, preferably after a family Sunday lunch.” Sure enough, the Jennifer Lopez vehicle was a huge hit on the platform, only recently dropping out of the top 10 most-watched titles in its history — after all, it doesn’t matter whether you’re engaged with the story or thinking about the Monday obligations creeping up on you, or even whether you’re still awake, the streaming minutes still count.

Husbands in Action, in a way, belongs to that same breed of Netflix original. After all, the film has enough pedigree and polish to earn the click (for fans of South Korean cinema, it reunites Jin Seon-kyu and Gong Myoung, stars of the mega-hit Extreme Job), and it even does a decent job of pretending to have enough substance to sustain its nearly 1-hour-50-minute runtime. But it passes before the viewer’s eyes exactly the way it passes across the screen, and the way it’ll probably pass through the streamer’s daily top 10: prompting a reaction or two, then being forgotten the moment it disappears.

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The idea here is to capitalize on the pre-established chemistry between the two actors by turning them into yet another mismatched duo in the middle of a crime plot. Jin Seon-kyu plays a tough cop highly skilled in martial arts, whose ex-wife (Kang Han-na) is kidnapped by the partner of a criminal he has just arrested. Now he has to team up with the woman’s new husband (Gong Myoung), a veterinarian who’s less harmless than he seems, to meet the kidnapper’s demands and rescue not only the damsel in distress, but also the ex-couple’s daughter.

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In the hands of director and screenwriter Park Gyu-tae, who comes from a string of successful comedies in South Korea, this plot leans more toward Kevin Hart (especially in his “action” movie outings alongside friend Dwayne Johnson) than Shane Black. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that Park is more devoted to a good visual gag — and there are indeed a few here that genuinely caught me off guard, drawing out a satisfied little cinephile smile — than to straight-up brawling, which means Husbands in Action has much less action than its title suggests.

In a way, that’s a blessing, because the film relies on frantic editing and uninspired choreography when the fights really break loose. At the same time, it’s hard to say that Husbands in Action is a great comedy either — it has some decent sense of how to be a great comedy, structurally speaking, but it spends that genre know-how on a plot with no impact, in a script that doesn’t string its jokes together with enough rhythm, or enough thematic awareness, to become more than the sum of its parts.

In the end, it’s a forgettable movie. Better than The Mother, certainly, but in a completely inconsequential way. Like so much of what gets released on Netflix, it’ll vanish from your memory the moment you wake up on the couch and realize the credits are already rolling.