Berlin (AP) – A woman chases through the night on a motorcycle – she is supposed to deliver an important package to a key witness. This is how the action film “The Courier” begins. It runs this Saturday at 11.35 p.m. on ZDF.
A church in New York is the setting for a spectacular spectacle. The criminal chief Ezekiel Mannings (Gary Oldman) is arrested by a strong police force and from then on is placed under house arrest in his comfortable apartment. At the same time, he is tried in a local court where the key witness Nick Murch (Amit Shah) is supposed to testify via video link.
Murch has observed a murder, is housed in the witness protection program and in a London luxury hotel, where he is closely guarded. There a courier (Olga Kurylenko) appears with a suitcase – from which a deadly cyanide gas escapes a little later. Only Murch – he’s in the bathroom at the moment – and the courier survive. They flee into the underground car park.
This is where all the rest of the action takes place. Because the two are not safe – policeman Bryant (William Moseley) is on Manning’s payroll and fights the two upright fighters with his accomplices to the point of blood. And that is to be taken literally, because the whole film is a pure orgy of a lot of blood and bad shooting – the corpses are nowhere near to be counted. Which is basically irrelevant, because they are all bad-tempered professional killers or psychopaths, often both at the same time.
Director Zackary Adler (45, “American Romance”) has directed a pretty bad film that relies on a lot of brutality and little logic from the start. There are no twists and turns, hardly any plot, senseless dialogues, nothing to laugh about anyway. And it is no longer a surprise that corruption extends to the highest police level.
Classical music plays to a lot of the shootings (which is supposed to enhance it), and also these scenes are bathed in red light (which could possibly be hell). But none of that can hide the fact that even these action scenes are pretty miserable.
Olga Kurylenko (43, “The Room”, “Sentinelle”) alone, as a nameless courier and former fighter in the Syrian war, is halfway convincing here. Especially since it plays a role that is usually reserved for male colleagues.
What Gary Oldman (63, “Mank”, “The Woman in the Window”) put into this film remains completely inexplicable – he plays the ice-cold boss with an eye patch as listless as one-dimensional. Somehow that fits in with the whole film.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210609-99-918885 / 3
