For those of you not in the know, every three months or so there’s a top secret meeting held between the supreme leaders of Prime Video and Netflix, where they take turns throwing darts at a dartboard to determine the next four or five occupants of the slop category, and who’s going to be responsible for them. On this dartboard, there are but two different designations: romantic comedy and action thriller.
Prime Video, evidently, struck the action thriller section with one of their throws, and the world has found Canary Black down its throat as a result.
Per FlixPatrol, the Kate Beckinsale-led, agent-gone-rogue, this-time-it’s-personal, and-so-on spy thriller has managed to clamber its way up the charts in the United States at the time of writing. For the moment, it’s occupying third place, ahead of fellow fodder Brothers (fifth place), and obtusely superior actioner Monkey Man (1oth place).
The film stars Beckinsale (who prolifically led the criticized-but-successful Underworld film series, in which she portrayed elite vampire assassin Selene as she gets caught up in a war between werewolves and vampires) as Avery Graves, a CIA agent who returns home one evening to discover that her husband David has been kidnapped, and if she ever wants to see him alive again, she has to steal a file called “Canary Black” (!!!!!) and deliver it to the kidnappers. Desperate, Avery puts herself in the crosshairs of her own agency for the sake of rescuing her husband, even if that means plunging the world into great peril by giving his kidnappers such a dangerous file.
Canary Black also stars Ray Stevenson — who passed away in May 2023 — as Avery’s boss and close ally Jarvis Hedlund. The actor’s colorful career included Star Wars’ Gar Saxon (The Clone Wars) and Baylan Skoll (Ahsoka), the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Volstagg (Thor, Thor: The Dark World, and Thor: Ragnarok), and a starring role in legacy Marvel film Punisher: War Zone, where he suited up as Frank Castle himself. Canary Black is his penultimate film appearance, with his final being the in-post-production 1242: Gateway to the West.
The usual problems with most all streaming-exclusive action thrillers are present here. Canary Black isn’t particularly well-choreographed or well-framed, its complicated, spy jargon-laden plot feigns intelligence while ignoring emotion, and more than anything, it simply doesn’t really care about being a movie.
Even if it’s somewhat overdone, there is something fundamentally interesting about the decision between plunging the world into terror or not letting your only loved one die. The problem with Canary Black, however, is that the buck stops at that very premise. There’s no real hook to Avery and David’s marriage that would make us uniquely root for them, and so there’s not much foundation for Canary Black to take a new direction with this kidnapped-spouse-for-cyber-nuke scenario. Even the telegraphed twist just hangs itself out to dry shortly after being revealed.
Indeed, there’s the pervading sense that most everything in Canary Black was made up on the fly, and such a feeling piques during the film’s ending. Without giving away any details, any consequences — emotional or otherwise — that Avery was teed up to deal with are completely scrubbed clean by the arrival of a new character who makes all of her problems go away. And the only thing worse than a film depriving you of an emotional payoff, is a film that does so without an iota of emotional setup in the first place.