Pressing play on an action movie like “Canary Black” is like ordering at McDonald’s. You’ve already agreed to lower your standards, so you don’t get to complain that it’s ultra-processed junk food. That’s what you signed up for. You were in the mood for middle-of-the-road comfort sustenance and that’s all you have any right to expect.
But we’ve all been to a fast food joint where, yes, you technically got what you paid for, but it was so greasy you could barely eat it. Or it got squashed for no discernible reason. Or it’s got a hair in it. Sure, you ordered off the dollar menu but even the dollar menu makes a few meager promises, and if they can’t even get that right… well, you have “Canary Black.”
“Canary Black” is a new kidnapping thriller from Pierre Morel, who 15 years ago directed “Taken.” That’s one of the most iconic films in the thriller genre, a simple but extremely effective piece of authoritarian action entertainment, where if you piss off Liam Neeson he’s legally allowed to kill everyone in your country. The film rebooted Neeson’s career as a three-star action movie icon and popularized the phrase “I have a certain set of skills.”
Unfortunately, Morel seems to have misplaced his skills. “Canary Black” is recognizable as an action movie but it’s neither thrilling nor dramatic enough to qualify as entertainment. It’s not even eclectic enough to satisfy as a low-budget throwback to 1990s bottom shelf b-movies like “Hollow Point” or “Crackerjack,” which at least understood that if you wanted to stand out from the other cookie-cutter action claptrap on the menu, you had to have a least some personality.
Kate Beckinsale stars as Avery Graves, an American secret agent living in Croatia with her oblivious house husband, David (Rupert Friend). Her latest assignment gets derailed when David is abducted, and a mysterious voice on the telephone directs Avery Graves to steal a top secret CIA computer file called — you guessed it — “Canary Black.” (What does “Canary Black” do? It’s a MacGuffin. It MacGuffs.)
So Avery Graves — whose full name is said so often there must be dozens of outtakes where her co-stars call her “Gravery Aves” — is now a fugitive from her own organization. Her boss Jarvis (the late Ray Stevenson, in one of his final roles) isn’t sure if he can trust her, but the movie goes through those paces anyway. You’d think these top secret spy rings would have a protocol for this kind of situation since, if movies like “Canary Black” and all the “Mission: Impossibles” are to be believed, their agents go rogue every other week.
Kate Beckinsale has been a reliable action star for decades, even — and sadly, often — when her movies can’t keep up with her. She’s working with her hands tied behind her back this time, often literally. The blasé fight scenes are often unreadable and she wears an awful, and awfully distracting wig for some of them. It’s less like we’re watching “Canary Black” and more like we’re playing “Where’s Waldo” with Beckinsale’s stunt double.
Beckinsale also adopts an American accent for most of the film, but she sounds ADR’ed most of the time, in a very different room than the other actors, so even “Canary Black’s” audio rarely coheres. Also for some reason Kate Beckinsale is doing a spot-on Marcia Gay Harden impression, which makes you wonder why Marcia Gay Harden doesn’t do more action movies. “Canary Black” isn’t much of a movie but it’s a decent proof-of-concept for Harden’s management team.
The plot is just a big ol’ ball of stuff happening. Avery Graves’ relationship with her husband takes up maybe three minutes of screentime, plus we know it’s based on a lie, so our emotional investment is low. When the spy plot finally kicks in it’s all cut-and-pasted from genre movie clichés, and even those tropes don’t stay consistent. CIA Agent Maxfield (Jaz Hutchins, “Peacock”) is the kind of guy who brags to Avery Graves that he tortures his prisoners for information, but in the very next scene he stops her from torturing his prisoner for information and says she’s gone too far and will pay for this. So what… what are we even doing here, movie?
There are moments of spy gadget fun in “Canary Black” — with “mute masks” and a drone that’s been repurposed into a jet pack — but given how bland the rest of Morel’s film is, the entertainment value may have been an accident. You can’t even sit back and enjoy the action because the editing makes it hard to follow. A chase scene with bad guys sticking landmines on our heroes’ car is so chaotic that it’s hard to tell whose vehicle just blew up or rammed into another one. You think it’s Ray Stevenson or Kate Beckinsale, because just before the impact we saw them react to potential danger, but right after the collision we cut back and nope, they were in another car the whole time. Again, I ask: What are we even doing?
“Canary Black” is a cheeseburger on Amazon Prime’s value menu, but they left out the cheese. And the meat. It’s a showcase for an action movie star with zero interest in letting her cut loose. And it makes about as much sense as its title. Which is to say, none.
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