In short: The Courier (2019)

A nameless black market courier (Olga Kurylenko) working in London is supposed to deliver some technical doodad needed for the secure off-site statement of one Nick Murch (Amit Shah) against crazy evil rich mastermind Ezekiel Manning (Gary Oldman). Turns out what she actually unwittingly delivers is a packet full of cyanide gas meant to kill Nick as well as those of his protectors not on Manning’s payroll and frame her for the killing. Fortunately, the good woman is a deserted Russian wet work specialist and really doesn’t like to be fucked with in this way, so she saves Nick and begins a game of “Die Hard in a Parking Garage” with Manning’s henchpeople.

Zackary Adler’s The Courier is a great example of the problems of many contemporary direct to home video action films, or really, the problems these things often have becoming actual movies (you gotta ask Martin Scorsese if that would make them “cinema”) instead of strange patchwork concoctions.

One of the biggest hurdles standing between a low budget action movie of this type and becoming good is the desperate need to get some name actors in. Sure, getting a couple of scenes of Gary Oldman looks good in the press material, and he’s certainly not phoning his stuff in here, but there’s also not enough Gary Oldman to sell him as the main villain of the piece – that he is never interacting with the The Courier’s heroine certainly doesn’t help with that either. So the film needs additional villains hanging on the phone with each other a lot, our villain’s daughter whose function in the plot is exactly zero, and whatever other filler it can come up with (like an insipidly written court scene), permanently cutting away from the actual business of survival in the parking lot at hand to things and scenes irrelevant or boring, repeatedly sabotaging its own potential at momentum. Frankly, as much as I love Oldman, and as much fun as he has chewing the scenery, as little has what he does to do with the rest of the movie. He could have been replaced by a voice on the telephone shouting commands without the film losing anything of import to its quality as a movie; its quality as a saleable product would probably suffer, but as a viewer I want a watchable movie much more than a saleable product.

Of course, given the amount of other filler, I’m not terribly sure the film could actually afford Kurylenko and Shah for more shooting days, which is a particular shame since Kurylenko is fully applying herself even in her worst movies, and Shah’s only one good role away from a really decent career.

All of this is particularly disappointing – again all too typical for this kind of action movie - because whenever the film gets around to Kurylenko doing her Bruce Willis bit (with Shah in a nice twist consigned to the kind of role action movies traditionally cast with women), Adler turns out to be a pretty fine director of action in a minimalist setting, finding a surprising amount of action set-ups for a rather small space, and using the always game Kurylenko well, too.


Alas, forty minutes of fun and sixty minutes of filler do not a (good) movie make.