Whenever there was a conversation about great female action stars, at least years ago, Kate Beckinsale frequently came up due to her high-flying action in the surprisingly long-lasting Underworld series, which spanned five films from 2003 to 2016. Now, Beckinsale is leading Amazon with the #1 (original) movie on the service, Canary Black. Not to be confused with Black Canary, the DC superhero.

The R-rated film follows a CIA operative blackmailed into betraying her country in order to save her kidnapped husband, a flip on a familiar trope of saving a wife or daughter. The synopsis says she turns to “underworld” contacts for help. Ha.

Beckinsale is now 51 and still kicking ass like many of her male counterparts, and clearly Amazon believed in her to make this, and audiences are interested enough to instantly make this movie #1. However….

The bad news is that the film does not appear to be good. Quite bad, in fact. It has a dismal 29% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and an also-bad 5.3/10 on IMDB. For context, even though critics hated essentially all of the Underworld movies, most of them had solidly high audience scores as they pleased a specific crowd. Canary Black? Not so much. As for actual critics, only 7 reviews are in and only one is positive for what would be a 14% early score.

But again, it’s performing well, putting up viewership higher on Amazon’s overall top 10 list than Rings of Power, The Legend of Vox Machina or Citadel Diana. I see Monkey Man at #7 on the list right now which I highly recommend if you want…an actually good action film. This is a reminder that it’s not just Netflix that can produce poor original movies, and that service has actually had a pretty good run lately. This…is not.

There are of course not enough female-led action films in Hollywood, so it’s a bummer this is bad. Charlize Theron is doing her best to cement herself as one of the top stars with Atomic Blonde, Aeon Flux, The Old Guard and Mad Max in her collection, though the first three are not particularly good. I’m not sure anything can top Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Milla Jovovich has done solid action work in the Resident Evil series but unfortunately not too much else. Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh were killer fighters in the MCU. I am looking forward to seeing Ana de Armas in her John Wick spin-off, Ballerina. But looking over the overall list, there are not enough of these, and not enough good ones.

Anyway, this appears to be a miss. Maybe next time Kate.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.