★★★
“Gone, and soon forgotten.”
Both director Morel and star Beckinsale should be familiar names around here. The former directed Peppermint, the latter for the Underworld franchise. Indeed, I was a little surprised this wasn’t directed by Mr. Kate Beckinsale, Len Wiseman. But I guess he was too busy getting booted off Ballerina. Morel, who also directed Taken, is a perfectly adequate stand-in. This is more or less what I expected. A forgettable yet adequately amusing spy caper, with Beckinsale kicking moderate ass in pursuit of… [/checks notes] a computer virus which could potentially wipe out the whole Internet in selected countries. As I write this, two weeks before the US presidential election, nuking the Internet seems like a pretty good idea to me.
She plays Canary Black no, actually, Avery Graves, a globetrotting spy whose husband David (Friend) has no idea of her day job. If that sounds a tad familiar, I refer you to Role Play, which had a similar concept. Then, David gets kidnapped and used as leverage against Avery. She is ordered to liberate the “Canary Black” file of blackmail data, and hand it to David’s abductors, or he will pay the price. Needless to say, her boss Jarvis Hedlund (Stevenson, in one of his last roles) isn’t happy about his best agent going rogue. However, in one of a series of twists – some expected, some not – the file ends up containing the virus discussed above, and Avery must stop it from being released by the bad guys.
This all just about skates by, mostly on the strength of Beckinsale’s charisma. She keeps things watchable, and helps paper over a number of elements that would otherwise have you going, “Hang on a minute…” For instance, when Avery is breaking into a server farm, she flies in on a drone, which for some reason, is lit up like Times Square. The facility also lets you slap in a USB drive without authorization. My entry-level work PC won’t let me do that, and I don’t believe I have access to world-shattering computer viruses, the last time I checked. Naturally, it all ends with Avery rushing towards a computer as the upload progress bar crawls… ever… so… slowly towards a hundred percent.
Morel handles the action with a professional eye, and considering she’s now in her fifties, Beckinsale isn’t bad. Though watching this the night after The Shadow Strays, the fights here seem like the participants are playing patty-cake in comparison. There’s a nice car chase through the streets of [/checks notes] Zagreb, but most of this is simply reasonably-made and thoroughly generic, and the lack of a memorable villain poses a problem. I couldn’t even tell you the main villain’s name, and his motivation appears to be purely mercenary, which is bad form for a bad guy. While I wasn’t bored, this is destined to be forgotten within a few weeks, and vanish into the black hole which is beyond the front page of Amazon Prime.
Dir: Pierre Morel
Star: Kate Beckinsale, Ray Stevenson, Rupert Friend, Jaz Hutchins