BY ROGER WATSON
Canary Black (2024) is a right load of old nonsense. But when your Gulf Air flight to Bahrain, already delayed by three hours, sits at the stand with you on board for a further three hours, this is the perfect kind of nonsense to pass the time.
For a start there is Kate Beckinsale, looking good in a jump suit and knocking ten bells out of every thug she encounters, playing the lead as the well-trained CIA agent Avery Graves. I had forgotten what Ms Beckinsale looked like or what I had seen her in. But I did not recognise her when she made her first appearance. Perhaps this is related to the subject of one of my recent columns.
Somewhat improbably, she is married to David Brooks played by Rupert Friend. David is portrayed as the sensitive type with no idea what his wife does for a living. For some unfathomable reason, David is Scottish. Since Rupert Friend is from Oxfordshire, the accent is laughably inauthentic.
Graves comes home after a mission in Japan to her husband who is kidnapped shortly afterwards. The action takes place in Croatia (mainly filmed in Zagreb) where, again somewhat improbably, Graves and her husband live. There also seems to be a major CIA operation in Croatia, the veracity of which seems doubtful.
An archetypically evil East European villain, Konrad Breznov (Goran Kostić) head of the Croatian secret service, has gone rogue and is using the kidnapping of Graves’ husband to make her find a computer file he wants. The file – Canary Black – contains something that can bring the whole world to ransom.
Thereafter, the film weaves its way through some well-worn plot devices and some highly improbable stunts. Avery, who is small and slight, seems undefeatable at hand-to-hand combat and is handy with an array of lethal weapons. She throws men twice her size and more around rooms with aplomb. She can also take a fair old walloping herself, emerge relatively unscathed and sprint off to her next encounter.
Avery has to hack into CIA files (yawn) and the CIA think she has turned traitor (yawn) and they put ‘every agent on the case’ to find her. If you are still awake, the action makes up for the lack of imagination.
Considering the CIA on the ground are making a pig’s ear of the job of finding Avery, Deputy Director Nathan Evans (Ben Miles) arrives from the United States to take charge. Believing Avery is a traitor and knowing how damaging the contents of the computer file are, he orders her to be ‘put in the ground’. But before Evans has unpacked his bags, Avery locates him and tortures him until he provides her with the password for the file she must steal.
Probably the most threadbare piece of action was the point at which Avery finally hacks her way past the highest level of CIA cyber-security and must download the information to steal it. You probably got there before me; she inserts a USB drive, clicks on ‘Download’ and her pursuers are almost upon her as we see the percentage of download increase…slowly. I don’t know about you, but this one gets me every time; probably because it is so relatable. Which is why they keep using it.
Many a high-speed car chase, car crash, shootout and grisly death ensue until Avery herself is finally caught by Breznov and his gang and strung up by the wrists. The intention is to let one of his female agents, Abby (Ana Cilas) finish her and her husband off and to do so as slowly as she wants. The plot now twists and, in case you decide to watch it, I won’t say how. But you will probably have guessed, even strung up by the wrists, Avery manages to escape.
All is well for Avery at the end. It is unclear whether her husband dies but, after plunging from a window into a river with many bullets about his person, he probably does. The final scene sees Avery being rehabilitated in the eyes of the state and being offered even more secret and more dangerous missions. Apparently, she is ‘just the kind of person the country needs’.
I strongly suspect this could turn into a franchise and we may not have seen the last of Kate Beckinsale in a jump suit. But the wisdom of doing so is questionable. I emerged from the film after ninety minutes having been entertained but my flight to Bahrain was then cancelled. This review comes from the Gulf Air lounge where I am awaiting the overnight flight.
Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.