Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Courier’ on Amazon and Hulu, in which Olga Kurylenko is Asked to Prop Up a Witless Action Movie

Amazon Prime and Hulu are now offering The Courier, an action-thriller that appears to have a pig in a poke’s chance in hell of competing for your attention amidst the current streaming glut (and I know that mixed metaphor is like putting ketchup in a G&T, but just you wait). Yet maybe, just maybe, the idea of Olga Kurylenko playing a Wickish kickass lady is worth 99 minutes of your life?

THE COURIER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A faceless brute pounds on Olga Kurylenko’s face as she’s tied to a chair. Then, someone drives a car straight at her. CUT TO OPENING CREDITS: Dozens and dozens of headlines about a female vigilante Batmanning around, and that’s Kurylenko’s character, known only as The Courier. Other headlines outline the deeds of Ezekiel Mannings (Gary Oldman), an NYC real estate mogul and Very Evil Person who’s about to go up a river of apples and oranges. He’s under house arrest in his urban palace, sipping. Scotch. Very. Slowly. As he enjoys his silk robes, Italian leather house shoes, high-end turntable setup and only the finest eyepatches and facial-scar creams.

Mannings awaits his fate; a witness in his prosecution is supposed to testify to a judge via video conference from London. But if you think this bad guy is just going to sit around while his ass is getting nailed to the cake he’s eating too, well, think again. The Courier takes about 133 Highly Cinematic Shots of her on a motorcycle to get across London and deliver a package that’s actually a bomb full of cyanide gas that’s supposed to kill the witness and the Interpol agents guarding him, but not the agents on Mannings’ payroll. The Courier takes two bullets but that doesn’t stop her from saving the witness and escaping into a parking garage where the majority of the subsequent drama unfolds like a shoe on the other foot.

So the Courier and witness guy dodge and kill goons galore as Mannings’ agent-on-the-take Bryant (William Moseley) grits his teeth like a project head who’s about to blow his deadline really, really hard. Meanwhile, an FBI guy in an office somewhere gets two or three scenes in which he’s angry, and I mention this only because he’s played by Dermot Mulroney. Will the Courier endure an improbable number of beatings and bullets to save the witness and put Mannings in a luxury prison? Or will the bad guys make a silk ear out of a goose and a gander?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This movie’s scintillating car-park suspense is like Die Hard meets the episode of Seinfeld where they’re lost and wandering aimlessly through a parking garage, and you’ll probably feel like Elaine’s dying goldfish while you’re watching it.

Performance Worth Watching: Since frequent ham-eater Oldman is content to cash a paycheck this time, Moseley — who’s breakthrough was playing Peter Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia movies — cooks and eats the scenery most unconvincingly, barely keeping a straight face as a lunatic who’s the type of Movie Crazy Guy that pops a prescription bottle open with one hand and takes some pills like he’s throwing back a shot of Jäger and chews them up maniacally. But hey, at least he seems to be the one cast member who’s almost having a good time here.

Memorable Dialogue: Three metaphors are mixed in this succulent bit of Agent Bryant dialogue: “You’re trapped. In a meat grinder. With no way out. That doesn’t involve you looking like chopped liver.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Let it be known that the Courier is the type of character who not only can take 24 direct judo chops to the windpipe and stay upright, but also can do that thing where you stand on one leg and do three quick high kicks in a row to a guy’s face. So let it be said that these crum-bums effed with the wrong courier, and the thought of Kurylenko whaling on some faceless male grunts isn’t an unattractive prospect. But The Courier is just a hack-job existing deep in the shadow of John Wick. It’s mercilessly over-edited action unfolds with a tight-budget fury on two-and-a-half levels of a parking garage, and the result is dull, stupidly violent and dreadfully repetitive. Repetitive like a fox.

Survival is the name of this game, for the characters, for the cast, for those of us watching the movie. At one point director Zackary Adler kills the lights and bathes the parking garage in red hues and flicks on the fire sprinklers to give the parking garage a TOTALLY DIFFERENT parking-garage vibe for the inevitable series of windpipe punches and dodgings of machine-gun fire to follow the previous array of windpipe punches and dodgings of machine-gun fire, and precede some more windpipe punches and dodgings of machine-gun fire. The cast game-faces it through a thimble-witted plot where the good guys can take multiple bullets and vagina punches and live to take another windpipe shot and the bad guys just can’t survive a windshield-wiper blade through the carotid artery. With a lot of talent at his disposal, Adler proves he can lead a horse of another color to water but can’t make it drink this thin gruel.

Our Call: SKIP IT. When the rubber meets the road, The Courier just never comes home to roost.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Courier