The Courier

JPV8526/10

Jan 13, 2020

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Half decent action-thriller though the dialogue was poor and the performance by the lead henchman (played by William Moseley), a proxy antagonist with Gary Oldman's character under "house arrest", was awful and came across as a whiny bitch than anything intimidating. On the plus side, I did like both Olga Kurylenko and Amit Shah, and Oldman for his part, which he likely filmed all of his scenes in one day, had his moments, at least. The fight choreography wasn't bad and did like they avoided using CGI blood splatter too much and used actual squids instead. All in all, it wasn't terrible and served as a passable action-thriller. **3.0/5**

r96sk5/10

Nov 21, 2024

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Olga Kurylenko almost makes it work. Almost. 'The Courier' makes for disappointing viewing, there isn't an element of it that I personally could file under 'good'. The aforementioned Kurylenko does try and her character is almost cool enough to make things watchable, but ultimately it's just all unconvincing. The, for the most part, one location is also an hindrance, for both Kurylenko's side of the story and for Gary Oldman's bit. Oldham's character is very lame, I at least had minimal interest in watching the lead but everything involving Mannings utterly bored me, to be honest. The iffy performances from Amit Shah and William Moseley don't help events either, while any Dermot Mulroney fans will be unhappy as that man gets a minuscule amount of screen time; I know it's none of my business, but I would be fascinated to see how much he got paid for this. The editing is also quite whiplash-y, particularly across the opening half of the movie. The music is OK, if only due to the opening and closing credits. Safe to see, this title got served far greater stuff from the 2020 namesake with Dominic Cooke and Benedict Cumberbatch!