My Weekly Movie Review Pick... The Courier - 2019 - Amazon Prime Streaming

Not sure how this one eluded me for so long. I'm a big Gary Oldman fan and thought I saw most of his movies. So much new content and so little time. I came across The Courier on the Amazon Prime streaming service starring Gary Oldman and I had to check it.

While researching the film for this post I discovered several titles with the same name. This is The Courier released in 2019. There was also a TV series and a movie simply titled Courier.

So the 2019 - The Courier stars Gary Oldman, Olga Kurylenko, and Amit Shah. The great lineup and the cast of characters really worked well together. As I stated earlier I'm a big fan of Gary Oldman. I've also enjoyed several movies with Amit Shah. This was the first time seeing Olga Kurylenko in a film, at least that I recall. I'll say right now, she's my new favorite female badass. Just wow... The fight scenes were pretty cool. I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's talk a little about the plot.

The basic plot goes like this... Gary Oldman plays a gangster/businessman who is on trial for murder. Amit Shah is the witness who's looking to testify against him. Olga Kurylenko plays the badass motorcycle courier who they're trying to set up as a patsy in order to kill Amit Shah.

So Gary Oldman plays Ezekiel Mannings. He's a successful gangster disguised as a businessman. Amit Shah plays Nick Murch who witnessed Ezekiel Manning murder, someone. Olga Kurylenko plays a really badass motorcycle courier who has a dark past and a background in black ops. She's hired to kill Nick Murch before he can testify but quickly realizes they're trying to set her up as a patsy.

Gary Oldman always does a great job playing the bad guy. He played this part as an entrepreneur/gangsta pretty well. For the most part, we'll call this the typical bad guy/gangsta boss role. I enjoyed his character and he played it well.

Olga Kurylenko and Amit Shah really steal the show though. I haven't seen her in other movies but her role as a badass motorcycle courier was played pretty well. The style of the film and her character reminded me of a Steven Seagal film. They could have replaced her with Seagal and the only thing that would change is the sex of the character. She's my new favorite female badass. She kicks ass in this movie from start to finish. If all her films are like this I'll be becoming a really big fan. It's the basic girl-power, female badass role, but she plays it really well.

(A little bit of a spoiler alert in this next paragraph, but nothing major though. )

I wasn't crazy about Amit Shah's role in this film. He played the character well but it was a really wimpy character. Then again, that's how a lot of his roles are. Frankly, I'm tired of seeing weak male characters in films. "Eww, so violent" was an actual quote at one point. IDK, we're just seeing too many of these weak male characters in films these days. It is "that movie" though, reversing gender roles. The woman is the hero protecting the man. In that way, it was refreshing and actually done well. His character does develop throughout the movie though. That was fun to watch.

The movie wasn't really special effects heavy. The effects they did use were done well IMHO. The fight scenes were well-choreographed and there were a lot of them. There was also no shortage of action. The movie is pretty much action-packed from beginning to end.

IMDB gave this 4.8 out of 10 stars and Amazon gave it 4 out of 5 stars. IDK, something doesn't add up there. Regardless, I enjoyed this movie. I'm used to liking movies with low iMDB rankings though. Maybe people just don't enjoy action movies the way they used to.

With that said, I will say that this is a typical action movie. Lots of well-choreographed fight scenes, great stunts, tons of shit blowing up on the screen, and lots of fight scenes with a light peppering of blood and pain. Sounds like a recipe for the perfect action movie.

I enjoyed just about everything in this movie. I'm a huge action fan though. It doesn't take much. Give me a decent script, a few explosions, some fight sequences, and a little blood and I'm happy. That's about what this movie covers. Besides the gender role reversals, there's nothing new here! I still found it an enjoyable waste of 1 hour and 39 minutes and I hope you do too if you decide to give it a watch.