Posts Tagged ‘Kate Beckinsale’

Canary Black

Director: Pierre Morel

Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Rupert Friend, Ben Miles, Goran Kostic, Saffron Burrows, Ray Stevenson

Running Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

Film Rating: 7 out of 10

After a swish opening sequence at a fancy apartment building in Tokyo, French director Pierre Morel’s new spy action film Canary Black moves to Zagreb, Croatia, whereby top CIA spy Avery Graves expertly played by British action star Kate Beckinsale (Van Helsing, Total Recall, Contraband) goes a deadly mission to save her kidnapped husband, the seemingly harmless David Brooks played by Rupert Friend (The Young Victoria, Pride and Prejudice, Asteroid City).

Avery liaises with her handler at Zagreb CIA station, Jarvis Hedlund played by the late star Ray Stevenson (The Three Musketeers, Thor, Memory) as she tries to figure out which evil mastermind is behind the kidnapping of David and what on earth is on the encrypted file called Canary Black.

Matthew Kennedy’s refreshingly original gender reversal screenplay, make the woman the main action hero and the victim in this case is the muscular and handsome David Brooks. The villain is the duplicitous Croatian minister Konrad Bresnov played by Bosnian actor Goran Kostic (Taken, The Zookeeper’s Wife).

Naturally Bresnov seeks world domination and wants to use Canary Black which is a dangerous digital spyware to wipe out the superpowers technological capabilities.

As Avery blasts her way to find her supposed husband, she crosses paths with the deputy director of National security Nathan Evans played by Ben Miles (Napoleon, Red Joan, Woman in Gold) in a bizarre sequence in a swanky urban hotel.

Canary Black is a slick, medium budget action thriller with Kate Beckinsale proving that she is indeed the right woman for the job, as a merciless CIA operative who is trying to stop Canary Black and save her husband.

French director Pierre Morel who brought audiences the highly successful Taken films featuring Liam Neeson does a good job of creating an atmospheric action packed spy thriller set in a relatively obscure European city at night.

Kate Beckinsale channels her talents from the Underworld series and does a believable job as the tough as nails spy Avery Graves. Vivienne Westwood supermodel turned actress Saffron Burrows appears at the end of the film as the mysterious Elizabeth Mills pointing to the possibility of a sequel.

Canary Black is a standard action film with a unique gender reversal whereby this time the tough guy is a woman who fends off multiple male assailants to rescue her helpless husband from the grips of an evil megalomaniac.

Canary Black gets a film rating of 7 out of 10 and is worth seeing as an unpretentious action film with no flashy cars, exotic locations or special gadgets. Just good old fashioned spy craft.

Total Recall

Farrell losing a sense of reality

The 21^st century version of the sci-fi action thriller Total Recall is another cinematic retelling of a Philip K. Dick story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, following on from Blade Runner (1982), Minority Report (2002), Paycheck (2003), Next (2007) and  The Adjustment Bureau (2011) and this time features Colin Farrell in the lead role of Douglas Quaid aka Cole Hauser a role first made famous by Arnold Schwarzeneggar in the original Paul Verhoeven garish version of a Mars set Total Recall released in 1990 featuring the voluptuous Sharon Stone as Lori and Rachel Ticotin as Melina.

Arnie's version

In this version of Total Recall, directed by Len Wiseman, the earth is mostly uninhabitable through devastating chemical warfare leaving only the United Federation of Britain (sections of the former UK) and The Colony (known now as Australia). Workers from the Colony are transported via a rapid underground train, a revolutionized Eurostar to the UFB an overpopulated simulacrum of late 21^st century London where they work on production lines producing Synthetics.

On the journey the hero Douglas Quaid is reading Ian Fleming’s novel The Spy Who Loved Me, a visual clue to how the rest of the film turns out. As is happens Douglas’s charming yet lethal wife Lori played by the sexy Kate Beckinsale is not who she appears to be and through an adventure which ignites when Douglas decides to give Rekall a try to break out of his industrial existence. Rekall is a drug induced manufactured memory enhancer whereby memories can be implanted into a person’s frontal lobe and people can cherish memories based on fabricated experiences.

Total Recall for the first 45 minutes is absolutely thrilling with lots of action and stunning production values with Wiseman clearly influenced by the iconic Blade Runner and similar sci-fi films with large awe-inspiring sets channeling a gritty version of I, Robot and of course Minority Report. The best scene is the chase sequence in the UFB with Farrell and Jessica Biel as Melina a fellow Colony freedom fighter who handles a fantastic uber-hovercraft on a high-tech multi-layered speedway which makes the M25 look like Noddy’s picnic. Bryan Cranston appears as the villain Cohaagen and Bill Nighy as the mysterious post-nuclear freedom fighter Matthias.

Where this version of Total Recall fails is the lack of character development and backstory which is made up for by the endless action sequences which detract from making Total Recall as brilliant and thought provoking as Blade Runner was 30 years ago. The film appears forced in places and action takes precedence over plot in a version of reality which could have done with more measured virtual clues and less bullets. See Total Recall if you are a hardcore Sci-Fi fan and don’t compare it to Paul Verhoeven’s garish and sensational 1990 version especially if viewers are dedicated fans of Philip K. Dick’s cinematized tales dealing with altered reality, memory and virtual personalities.