Kate Beckinsale must rescue her kidnapped husband in espionage thriller Canary Black. As Liam Maguren writes, the film marks another notch in her action star legacy.
Canary Black
It’s hard to believe Kate Beckinsale hasn’t been in more action films. The British actor entered the blockbuster limelight in the 2000s by featuring prominently in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbour, starring alongside Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing, and delivering a decade’s worth of Underworld movies.
Armed with a burning screen presence and weapons-grade gravitas, Beckinsale comes locked and loaded with the essential action star qualities audiences latch onto. And yet, the 2010s let most of her potential in that department go wanting. Beyond two Underworld sequels and 2012’s Total Recall (her villainous turn was perhaps the only interesting thing about that reboot), there was little in the way of Beckinsale badassery.
Fortunately, Beckinsale’s building on her action star legacy again thanks Prime Video. We recently saw her in 2021’s Jolt, where she played a bouncer who’d self-administer anger-managing electic shocks to stop her homicidal urges. Now we’re treated to Canary Black, a new Amazon Original espionage movie from Taken director Pierre Morel.
Beckinsale plays Avery Graves, a CIA agent who we first see in Japan plundering a mobster’s suite with the swift severity of a one-woman army. She’s not the type to knock people out with a single punch; she’s all judo flips and Muay Thai elbows. Combining her nimbleness with bullseye-level accuracy, the film’s death-dealing opening makes it crystal clear that she’s an agent at the top of her game – a typically hard-hitting sequence we’d expect from the director of Taken.
Graves’ professional and personal worlds come crashing down when her husband gets (ahem) taken by terrorists intent on blackmailing her. The deal: betray your country, get your spouse back. Her husband’s a treasure, a loveable Scot who knows a good red and has a soft spot for puppies, and the villain’s perfectly hate-worthy, a man who’d hold the world for ransom to fill his pockets while looking like a facemash between Putin and Dr. Evil.
This is where the film’s title comes in. The baddies want her to retrieve the Canary Black, a secret file the CIA currently possess, to get their hands on sensitive information leading to a sweet payday. So far, so typical of an espionage flick. However, it soon becomes apparent this Canary Black is much more than a generic Excel sheet labelled MacGuffin.csv.
Not that it matters much to the agents tasked with Graves’ immediate capture. When her attempts to retrieve the Canary Black marks her as a dirty traitor to the United States of America, Graves is caught between a race against time to save her husband’s life and a race away from the CIA who are hot on her trail.
As such, the film leaves little room for dawdling. At just over 100 minutes, Canary Black runs at a hasty clip, giving just enough space for its key characters to leave an impression before thrusting the audience back into a fist fight / gun battle / foot race / car chase.
All of it’s anchored by Beckinsale’s presence, an actor who easily exude both decorum and deadliness wholly fitting of a CIA veteran. Sitting next to her previous action-heavy roles as a vampire leader, a vampire hunter, a villainous undercover agent, and a battery-powered bouncer, Avery Graves is another notch in Beckinsale’s action legacy.
