Theme: Hostages

Canary Black (2024) – Kate Beckinsale

This movie begins with the lead character wearing a white wig, not dissimilar to Atomic Blonde. She then goes on a bit of a killing spree, to obtain something from someone’s safe. There’s a lot of John Wick style shooting, stabbing and general hand-to-hand combat. But it’s lacking personality – all that grunting doesn’t make it any more charismatic – it’s really quite shallow in the opening scenes. The monotonous yet fast paced opening ends just about soon enough before I feet the need to fast forward, which makes for a respectable start.

After the opening action scene, we get a bit of domestic drama & romance which really shows the lead character Avery Graves (played by Kate Beckinsale) and her boyfriend David Brooks (played by Rupert Friend, from the Agent 47 sequel) as both having a serious lack of credible acting ability and a serious lack of action hero quality on top of that. Their acting is really emotionless, not even skin-deep, but in an irritable way, not in an ice-cold slick action movie star way. It’s like they’re both sleep deprived, numb zombies concentrating on something else and going through the motions while half asleep. The acting could hardly be any worse even from an indie B-movie, and come to think of it, the cinematography is pretty weak too, but it took a bit longer for me to clock on to this. Kate and Rupert both seem better suited to some kind of argumentative soap opera drama series. They’re both droning out their lines with terrible timing and zero sentiment early on – it’s really quite strange how random it is. Maybe AI made it up? It’s got a similar level of lifelessness as AI generated pictures. Maybe the audio is poorly synchronised with the lip sinking. Maybe the accents are a terrible choice. The outfits too. But the facial expressions and body language are that of sleepy grumpy teenagers while pretending to be hotshot secret agents having interesting and romantic chats. I blame the casting first & foremost, and by 10 minutes in I’m confident this movie is going to be rated Below Average at best. Aside from their individual flaws, the chemistry between the two of them couldn’t be any weaker if it tried.

The backing sound of this movie early on is a lot of white noise and screeching – it really makes me want to turn it off by the 13 minute mark. There’s very little going for this movie at all, in the beginning, and it’s really quite irritating, but it lasts over 100 minutes (including time for rolling credits). So far it’s on course for a rating even weaker than Below Average, but if the plot and action pick up in a good way, and the terrible background sound sorts itself out, then Below Average could surprisingly still be on the cards.

Fortunately, the movie does get a lot more real & interesting when the lead character’s boyfriend gets kidnapped and the kidnapper calls with his ransom demand in the 15th minute. Impressively, this energy is sustained for most of the movie, making it deserve of respectable rating of just Below Average. If it had a more advanced plot, and better actors, and more dynamic action, and higher budget cinematography, it would be easier to rewatch, but as it stands, it’s not so rewatchable until you’ve totally forgotten how it goes, and this is a big factor in why its rating remains Below Average as opposed to Bang Average – a score it only just falls short of.

Other key cast members, who are also slightly familiar faces from other movies, include Ray Stevenson who does a decent job as Avery’s boss Jarvis Hedlund (Ray passed away in May 2023 due to heart problems); Ben Miles as Nathan Evans who has a superior position to Jarvis, and Jaz Hutchins as Agent Maxfield who works directly for Nathan and has no problem outcasting & interrogating Avery and even her boss Jarvis as if he holds a more senior role or is at least on the same level. Apparently they’re all meant to be CIA agents, and I think Nathan is meant to be the director of the CIA, but it seems like Nathan & Maxfield are working for a superior agency to Jarvis & Avery, and at one point Nathan answers the phone seemingly calling someone else ‘Director’ so who knows. Their exact roles and agencies are not clearly defined in this movie, but their roles in relation to each other are clear enough.

High Rollers (2025) – John Travolta

This is a bit of a fun action movie, starring a 70-year-old John Travolta, with slight vibes of Mission Impossible. Although it gets off to a slow start, and gets a bit nasty in places, and is generally quite a simple movie, and has a long monotonous action scene towards the end; once it gets going it sustains an upbeat vibe and remains mildly captivating pretty much until the end scenes, which is rare for a movie so plain & simple as this one – especially one with a bit of a B-movie vibe about it. It’s actually quite an achievement and earns this movie a rating of slightly Below Average which makes it not much weaker than a lot of classics, which is quite an achievement considering some parts have a slight whiff of B-movie acting & cinematography, which is especially obvious towards the end, but does not make the movie a complete write-off – even the ending is slightly captivating, and the very ending is alright. It’s even tempting to rank this movie Bang Average on a par with many classics, but we have to consider its rewatchability which considering the minimal plot, simple script and intermittently weak acting & cinematography would make it quite hard to rewatch until it’s been pretty much totally forgotten again.

Travolta’s age is telling here – not so much in his face, but in the way he moves like a stiff & fragile stumbling old man.

Purely based on appearance, one of the supporting cast members called Caras, played by a guy who calls himself Swen Temmel, is almost certainly a real life son of John Travolta. Add to this how he looks nothing like his official father, but looks so much like Travolta he’s even been pictured doing impressions of him and the resemblance is striking.

The main woman on the protagonists’ team is a hacker called Link, played by Natali Yura, who is like a pound shop (or dollar store) Scarlett Johannson. Not as smart, classy or attractive but a similar flavour nevertheless.

Demián Castro does a solid job in playing Zade Black – the “target” and brother of the main antagonist. And the main antagonist – a man called Salazar, who has coerced the team of protagonists into helping him – is played quite adequately by Danny Pardo, although he doesn’t make as strong an impression and doesn’t get so much screen time as Castro.

All in all, I’d say this is a Netflix-grade movie, that’s blessed with a single elderly A-List star, and seems to have heavily supplemented its team of old-school industry dogsbodies with green new blood, such that it sits somewhere between Respectably Average and Hard To Watch.

Cleaner (2025) – Daisy Ridley

Although it stars a celebrity of massive Star Wars fame in Daisy Ridley, this movie sits somewhere between Hollywood and B-movie level. It reeks of indie-level production. It seems like a British production with mostly sub-par acting. The camerawork ranges from not bad, to annoying – there’s too often too much zoom on emotional faces doing bad acting, which makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience at times.

The plot starts gaining momentum from around half an hour in, when a building gets hijacked. Prior to that it’s little more than irritating drama. Once it warms up, the action is a bit thin, and drama is a bit OTT, and the quality of acting is mostly weak. Daisy Ridley’s character doesn’t actually enter the building to properly tackle the baddies until 45 minutes later. That’s a massive fail of this movie, from an action hero movie point of view – how the lead star never actually gets inside the building to properly fight the baddies until the last 20 minutes of the movie! What a non-descript drama-fest.

The autistic guy namedropped Piers Morgan a few times, including asking “what would Piers Morgan do”, which makes me think he may have personally sponsored this movie in an attempt to improve his own public image.

I rate this movie Barely Watchable. It’s several levels down from Bang Average, and just one level up from Unwatchable. I’m really surprised to see Daisy Ridley get involved with of movie of this calibre. Maybe she’s struggling to find work these days. Maybe she’s being blanked by Hollywood for walking away from their darker antics – if ever I found that to be the case, she will have earnt my respect, but as it stands, this movie is bad – real bad, and barely watchable at the best of times. I honestly recommend just giving it a miss – it’s a desperate waste of time unless you’re tragically bored stiff already. Would you believe it actually had a Box Office release, grossing over 1 million dollars? It even had a budget of 25 million dollars – I wonder where that money went. Maybe this movie was really just a money laundering exercise. They successfully managed to make nearly 24 million bucks disappear. I almost feel embarrassed for wasting my time sitting through this movie and taking the time to review it on this site. The things I do so you don’t have to!

Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009) – Jean-Claude Van Damme

The basic concept is a good one but the script and cinematography never catch fire, they seem a bit soul-less, a bit like a B movie. The UNISOLs are meant to be cold, not the whole movie.

This movie lacks any significant female role. It had potential for a bit of warmth with the introduction of a non-UNISOL soldier played very well by Mike Pyle, giving Andrei Arlovski‘s latest generation of UNISOL a run for his money. But just as Pyle was growing into his role he got killed off. Interesting plot twist at the very end though, as Pyle’s character appears to have been cloned to create a load of new UNISOLs – this whets the appetite for the fourth & final movie in the saga (Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning, 2012) which brings back Van Damme & Arlovski while also co-starring Scott Adkins, but unfortunately does not feature Pyle so the ending to Regeneration is a bit of phony cliffhanger.

Dolph Lundgren does well in his return to the Universal Soldier movie series, as of course does Jean-Claude Van Damme – the main star of every movie in the series except the last (Day Of Reckoning) where Adkins takes over as the main protagonist since Van Damme is getting quite old by this time (in his early 50s) while active soldiers in the real world are generally young (with elastic bodies and impressionable minds). It’s just a shame they’re working with a weak script and deadpan cinematography, so I can’t rate it higher than So-So even if the genre, stars and concept are all excellent.

Sudden Death (1995) – Jean-Claude Van Damme

Sudden Death (1995)

From the outset it’s apparent that this movie is a better production than most of Van Damme’s movies. Sudden Death is a proper movie and has a very similar concept to Die Hard.

Van Damme plays a fire marshal working at a Pittsburgh Penguins v Chicago Blackhawks hockey game where he also brought his kids, and it turns out the Vice President is having a party in the owner’s box and has a large security detail but it’s been infiltrated by a highly organised gang of crooks who hold the Vice President and all people in the arena to ransom after rigging the whole place to explode, while everyone’s watching the game oblivious. Van Damme’s character smells something’s up when his daughter gets kidnapped after she witnessed a murder, so Van Damme tracks her down and begins to get to the bottom of the whole operation.

I’m generally not a fan of political dramas, but this movie contains just the right amount of that stuff and has just about strong enough actors to make it work well between the faster action scenes.

There aren’t really any boring bits in this movie, so long as you’ve not seen it already within the last few years. But it’s also pretty standard, in a way. So I rate it Upper-OK.