Stream It Or Skip It?

Canary Black (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) teams director of generic action movies Pierre Morel (Taken, Peppermint, Freelance) with the star of a couple-few too many generic action movies, Kate Beckinsale (Jolt, almost all of the Underworlds). The latter plays a CIA agent infiltrating a secret terrorist cabal to rescue her kidnapped husband, a scenario that, you will not be at all shocked to learn, finds her operating outside the bounds of the agency. Now, you know you’re watching a high-tech thriller when this movie includes absolutely SCINTILLATING shots of progress bars slowly ticking up to 100 percent, and over-the-shoulder cams capturing the broiling intensity of an email being typed up and sent. The question is whether Morel and Beckinsale can transcend such genre trappings by injecting the film with a little style or substance. 

The Gist: The name of Beckinsale’s character in this movie is Avery Graves, which I think is a touch sillier than if her name was Canary Black. I mean, her CIA codename isn’t even Canary Black. No, Canary Black is the name of a computer file that can Destroy Everything, but only if the progress bar slowly ticks up to 100 percent while the computer is connected to decent wifi. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Avery Graves walks in the door and is like honey I’m home from my business trip, smoochy smoochy, and her husband David (Rupert Friend) is none the wiser that she wasn’t selling shower curtain rings or whatever, but in fact was wearing a goofy blond wig and Batmanning down the side of a building and assassinating people and doing all the other things high-level CIA agents do. 

It’s David and Avery Graves’ anniversary. Avery Graves gives David some jokey underwear and David gives Avery Graves a really nice leather jacket that might look great if she ever needs to run around town shooting people and diving out of cars or whatever. David wants a puppy. Life is good for the happy couple. Sure would be rough if things every caught up with them, as in Avery Graves’ very dangerous secret CIA things, wouldn’t it?

Alas. Catch up with them, things absolutely do. If they didn’t, what kind of boring movie might this be, I wonder? So Avery Graves walks into the kitchen one day to find it all smashed up, with David nowhere to be found. He’s been husbandnapped. She gets a call on a burner phone from a gentleman making demands with a distorto-voice: Find the CIA’s Black Canary file and hand it over or David gets it, and by “it” I mean “killed to death.” Now, Avery Graves has nobody but David. No family, no nothing. So she’s gotta save him. Is he the only good thing in her world? He sure seems like the only good thing in her world, unless to her a good thing is living one life where she kills people and a second life where she doesn’t kill people. It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta be a sociopath and do it.

Avery Graves’ quest isn’t an easy one. At least she has one ally in her CIA supervisor Jarvis Hedlund (Ray Stevenson, RIP), who covers for her as she risks becoming a traitor to her whole damn country by infiltrating her own employer’s system. This requires her to, I believe, email tech support in a scene that will pin you to your seat and make your hair fly backward like you’re sitting in a wind tunnel. Similarly thrilling are the parts where she works her way through the bad guys with bullets and knives, dodging big-time CIA honcho Nathan Evans (Ben Miles), who always says things like “It’ll jeopardize every office from the President and everyone below it!”, and making her way to the sniveling villain (Goran Kostic) who’s behind this diabolical scheme to hold the entire world hostage for $1 trillion. Will Avery Graves save the world and her hubs? Seems like a fair bet, but the parlay on any pending twists might be tricky.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This movie wants to be John Wick meets Tom Clancy thrillers (Patriot Games, The Sum of All Fears, etc.) meets Mission: Impossible, but it doesn’t seem to be able to pinpoint what makes all those movies good. 

Performance Worth Watching: Slim pickings here, considering the assortment of stock characters stocking this one. Seems silly to not give Beckinsale much to do beyond wearing a perma-furrowed pursed-lips scowl, which is so firm it almost seems to insist we forget she excels at light comedy and thoughtful drama too.

Memorable Dialogue: Canary Black is filled to the brim with STONE COLD dialogue, e.g. the following: 

Evans: It’s a digital nuke in the cyber arms race… even the President doesn’t know about it!

Hedlund: Cold war, digital war – only the assholes change. 

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So is it at least fun to watch Avery Graves bravely, gravely putting people in their graves? Almost. Morel seems content to maintain the genre baseline – a twisty overcomplicated MacGuffin plot interspersed with gunfights, fisticuffs, car chases, and the occasional teensy dab of emotional character development – without innovating on it. Something fresh and new seems like too much of a creative burden for Canary Black, which humorlessly goes through the motions like a Liam Neeson dad-movie vehicle that’s just barely worth theatrical release (let’s all get fired up for The Ice Road 2, coming in 2025!), a genre that Morel knows too well, considering he pretty much invented it. 

If you dig for a lone scraggly root of subtext and loosely and generously interpret it, you may turn up an is-she-married-to-David-or-to-the-CIA character thread among this boilerplate chugga-chug through acceptably workmanlike action sequences and a ream-and-a-half of exposition. But honestly, questing for theme or deeper meaning is a waste of time. The lame twists, sloppy nonsense plot and clunky declarative dialogue (“(INSERT NAME HERE) – this is an unpleasant surprise!”; “I’m gonna take pleasure in breaking you down, traitor!”) open-arm invite us to roll our eyes. Kostic is asked to do nothing beyond being a diluted Bond villain, Stevenson stands around being stern and Beckinsale isn’t asked to do anything outside the bounds of tough-woman posing. She’s convincing enough as Avery Graves bravely, gravely putting people in their graves, but this bland movie she cannot save. 

Our Call: SKIP IT. Let’s wave at Avery Graves as she bravely, gravely puts people in her graves: Bye bye!

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.