Amazon Prime Video's #1 movie is a new action film from Kate Beckinsale

Whenever there was a conversation about great female action stars at least a few years ago, Kate Beckinsale often came up due to her stellar action in the surprisingly long-running Underworld franchise, which spanned five films from 2003 to 2016. Now Beckinsale is leading Amazon with the service's #1 (original) film, Canary Black. Not to be confused with Black Canary, the DC superhero.

The R-rated film follows a CIA agent who is blackmailed into betraying her country to save her kidnapped husband – a twist on the familiar narrative of rescuing a wife or daughter. The summary states that she turns to contacts from the “underworld” for help. Ha.

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

The bad news is that the movie doesn't seem to be any good. Actually quite bad. It has a dismal rating of 29% on Rotten Tomatoes and an equally poor rating of 5.3/10 on IMDB. For comparison, even though critics essentially hated all of the Underworld films, most of them achieved solidly high ratings because they appeal to a specific audience. Canary black? Not so much. There are only seven reviews from actual critics, and only one is positive, which would be an early rating of 14%.

But here too, the film does well and places higher on the Amazon top 10 list in terms of viewership than “Rings of Power”, “The Legend of Vox Machina” or “Citadel Diana”. I currently see Monkey Man at number 7 on the list, which I high Recommend it if you like… a really good action movie. This is a reminder that it's not just Netflix that can produce bad original films, and that service has actually had a pretty good run recently. That is not the case.

Of course, there aren't enough action films directed by women in Hollywood, so it's a shame that this is bad. Charlize Theron is doing her best to establish herself as one of the top stars with Atomic Blonde, Aeon Flux, The Old Guard and Mad Max in her collection, even though the first three aren't 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 much else. Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh were killer fighters in the MCU. I'm looking forward to seeing Ana de Armas in her John Wick spin-off, Ballerina. But if you look at the overall list, there aren't enough of them and not enough good ones.

Anyway, this seems like a failure. Maybe next time, Kate.

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