THE COURIER (2019)

Genre: Action/Thriller
Director: Zackary Adler 
Cast: Olga Kurylenko, Gary Oldman, Amit Shah, William Moseley, Alicia Agneson, Greg Orvis, Calli Taylor, Dermot Mulroney
Runtime: 1 hr 40 mins
Rating: M18 (Violence)
Released By: Shaw Organisation
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 23 August 2020

Synopsis: Set against a gritty London backdrop, Olga Kurylenko plays a tough motorbike courier whose delivery is interrupted when she discovers one of the packages she's transporting is a bomb. The gas bomb she’s carrying is set to kill Nick Murch (Amit Shah, Final Score), the only witness able to testify in Washington DC against ruthless crime lord Ezekiel Mannings (Gary Oldman, The Dark Knight). As the British Police and FBI scramble to deal with the mess, the mysteriously welltrained and equipped courier teams up with unlikely partner Nick to evade Mannings' heavily armed goons and make sure that justice is delivered. 

Movie Review:

Olga Kurylenko, the Bond girl from Quantum of Solace has joined the ranks of action heroines in The Courier, one of the many low budget subpar action thrillers produced by Grindstone Entertainment each year.

Joining Olga is Oscar winning actor Gary Oldman, although both never met each other in the entire course of the movie. Olga plays a courier who is tasked with delivering a package to a location where a trial witness, Nick Murch (Amit Shah), is held. It turned out that the package is a cyanide bomb arranged by crime lord, Ezekiel Mannings (Oldman), to kill Nick.

Being more than just a good Samaritan, the courier decides to save Nick from the clutches of Mannings’ henchmen and a corrupt cop, Agent Bryant (William Moseley from The Chronicles of Narnia). It’s a race against time as the courier and Nick must find all sort of ways to outlast and outwit the heavily armed goons before backup arrives.

To be fair, director Zackary Alder and his team of writers did a rather decent job concocting the action pieces given the obvious less than stellar budget, although the plotting is an absolutely duh. Being an ex-military deserter probably is the only thing you know about Olga's character. Perhaps Alder is pulling a John Wick except there is no puppy, no love interest or a sequel in sight.

Ezekiel Mannings doesn’t fare much better. All Oldman has to do is put on an eye patch, scream a few lines, listen to opera and talking to his onscreen daughter in a few select scenes in his vast New York mansion. A paycheck that is easily earned by the acclaimed actor. Nobody knows exactly what dirty deeds Mannings has done, except he wants Nick dead because the latter sort of stumble upon Mannings murdering a man.

As it conveniently turned out, all the cops turned out to be crooks, and there is an unnecessarily contrived cameo by a known actor as an US agent in the finale to add on to all the silliness before the credits rolled. Likely wanting to expand his portfolio, Moseley takes on the thankless role of a villain who mostly do the controlling and shouting from the control room until the climatic finish with his sniper henchman.

The Courier does churn out several decent fights and shootouts in a multi-storey carpark which basically stands in for almost the entirety of the movie. Olga indeed puts in lots of hard work as she gets messy, bloody and tough with several stronger brutes. The courier actually wears a high-tech motor helmet capable of seeing in the dark though we are plain curious where she got it from. Stark Industries? There’s also a fancy drone which surveillance and kills if guns and knives are no longer a thing.

There’s very little satisfaction coming out of a movie like The Courier. It’s stylishly violent (kudos to the real stunts and gruesome makeup) but the plot is so mundane and predictable that it’s more tiring than compelling to watch the courier in constant motion. Olga Kurylenko no doubt breathes much life to the character given her gung-ho performance. She is great but the movie on the whole is not.

Movie Rating:

(The Courier delivers a mindless, generic action experience)

Review by Linus Tee