Canary Black: Kate Beckinsale’s 2024 Spy Thriller — Plot, Cast, Reviews, and the Lawsuit Behind the Scenes

Canary Black is a 2024 action-thriller film directed by Pierre Morel and released on Amazon Prime Video on October 24, 2024. It stars Kate Beckinsale as a CIA agent who is blackmailed into undertaking missions in exchange for her kidnapped husband’s life, and was released by Amazon MGM Studios to generally negative reviews. It is a streaming-first spy film that blends the rogue-agent-goes-off-book formula of classic espionage cinema with the personal stakes of a love story under duress.

The film arrived with considerable expectations — Pierre Morel directed Taken, one of the defining action films of the 2000s, and Kate Beckinsale is one of the most recognisable female action stars of her generation. Despite the actor’s dedication to the role, critics were split on whether the film lived up to its potential. The reviews ranged from enthusiastic praise for Beckinsale’s committed performance to sharp criticism of the screenplay’s logic gaps and pacing.

What makes Canary Black particularly interesting as a cultural moment — beyond the film itself — is everything that happened around it. Reports emerged that the film was allegedly filmed in unsafe circumstances, and Beckinsale filed a lawsuit against the producers over the same. A movie that received mixed reviews became a much larger story about set safety, working conditions, and what actors endure in the pursuit of action sequences that audiences often take for granted.

The film is also the final major role of the late Ray Stevenson, who died in May 2023 — a year before the film’s release. The film is dedicated to Ray Stevenson, who died a year before it was released. That dedication gives the film an elegiac quality entirely separate from its on-screen content.

The Plot: A CIA Agent Pushed to the Edge

CIA operative Avery Graves is blackmailed by terrorists into betraying her own country to save her kidnapped husband. Cut off from her team, she turns to her underworld contacts to survive and help locate the coveted intelligence that the kidnappers want. Betrayed at every turn, she must rely on her cutting-edge training and primitive fighting skills in a deadly race to deliver a ransom that could trigger a global crisis.

The film opens in Tokyo, where Avery completes a mission before returning home to Croatia — only to find her husband David missing. The kidnapper, a Croatian cyberterrorist named Breznov, demands that she steal a classified CIA file called Canary Black — hidden, in one of the film’s more inventive details, inside the fake tooth of a prisoner at a CIA black site.

The overall story involves foreign operatives who have a scheme using Canary Black for getting about one trillion dollars by a ransom play that seeks to hit every nation on Earth, otherwise a doomsday virus will be selectively released that would basically doom the countries that don’t comply. The stakes, in other words, escalate considerably as the plot develops.

Cast: Strong Performers in a Difficult Script

The cast assembled for Canary Black is, by any measure, more accomplished than the final product fully utilises. Kate Beckinsale carries the film with evident commitment — she has been a reliable action star for decades, even when her movies can’t keep up with her.

Rupert Friend plays David, Avery’s civilian husband — a role that, as critics noted, receives surprisingly little screen time given how central the character is to Avery’s emotional motivation. Saffron Burrows plays DCIA Nathan Evans, Avery’s superior. And Ray Stevenson appears as Jarvis, Avery’s boss within her operational unit — bringing his customary gravitas to a role that the script does not fully develop.

It was sad this was Ray Stevenson’s last role. Watching him again, there is that quality he always brought — a weight, a presence that elevates scenes simply by his being in them. His dedication in the credits transforms what might have been a routine streaming thriller into something tinged with genuine loss.

Filming: Croatia Doubles for the World

One of the most visually distinctive aspects of Canary Black is its use of Croatian and Slovenian locations — which stand in, with varying degrees of plausibility, for Tokyo, Singapore, and various other international settings.

Filming took place primarily in Zagreb, where shooting interrupted service for several trams to control the environment of the outdoor action sequences, which included Beckinsale flying over the city from a drone and hanging from rooftops. The city of Rovinj doubled for Tokyo. The end scene was filmed in Ljubljana, Slovenia at the triple bridge.

Filming began in Croatia in October 2022, and continued through January 2023. That timeline — shooting through the Croatian winter — adds context to the reports of difficult working conditions that would later emerge through Beckinsale’s legal action.

Critical Reception: Divided and Divisive

The gap between audience reaction and critical consensus on Canary Black is notable. Critics largely dismissed it — the 18% Rotten Tomatoes score reflects widespread dissatisfaction with the screenplay, pacing, and action choreography. Audience scores were considerably more forgiving, with many viewers finding it perfectly adequate Friday-night streaming entertainment.

The film starts off slowly, with a lackluster opening fight scene that could set poor expectations. However, the action improves as the film goes on, though the dialogue can be confusing and could lose some viewers along the way.

The most consistent criticism across reviews — both professional and audience — concerned the audio. Beckinsale adopts an American accent for most of the film, but sounds ADR’d most of the time, in a very different room than the other actors, so even the film’s audio rarely coheres. Multiple reviewers flagged this as distracting, though it later acquired additional context given the injury and production difficulties that Beckinsale would subsequently detail in her lawsuit.

On the positive side, Beckinsale delivers a strong performance, balancing toughness and vulnerability, while the film blends action with personal stakes offering suspense, twists, and emotional depth beyond typical spy thrillers. The divide is real — what some viewers found formulaic, others found satisfying precisely because it delivered what it promised.

The Lawsuit: What Happened Behind the Camera

The most significant story surrounding Canary Black ultimately had nothing to do with its plot. Kate Beckinsale filed a lawsuit under the pseudonym ‘Jane Doe’ against her Canary Black producers for creating an unsafe working environment. She later amended her complaint to include communications with the defendants, revealing her identity.

Beckinsale’s legal complaint accused Anton Entertainment Media Services, Inc. and producer John Zois of negligence, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The document claims that Beckinsale suffered a serious knee injury after being exposed to dangerous and unsafe conditions on the set, including long set days often lasting fifteen hours, inadequate equipment and medical personnel, and failure to adequately support the high physical workload.

The producers were accused of forcing her to continue to work despite her injury, thus aggravating it further. The lawsuit cast the production’s visible flaws in a new light — the awkward audio, the visible use of stunt doubles, the uneven action sequences — as possible symptoms of a production environment that was not adequately supporting its lead performer.

Where Canary Black Fits in Kate Beckinsale’s Career

Beckinsale has spent much of her career navigating the particular challenge of being a credible female action star in an industry that has historically been unsure what to do with such performers outside of franchises. The Underworld series gave her a sustained platform — five films across fifteen years — but subsequent action vehicles have been uneven in quality.

Kate Beckinsale might be in her 50s but she has not lost touch of being an action superstar — there is a lot of juice left in this woman to play leading roles in action movies. The enthusiasm is genuine, but Canary Black illustrates the challenge: a performer with real physical commitment and screen authority, placed in material that does not fully honour either quality.

Conclusion

Canary Black is a film that contains more stories than its runtime accommodates — a spy thriller with genuine ambitions, a streaming action vehicle with real production ambitions, a final performance from a beloved actor, and a cautionary tale about what can happen when the people behind the camera do not adequately protect the person in front of it. Kate Beckinsale’s commitment to Canary Black was, by her own legal account, far greater than the production deserved — and the resulting film sits in that uncomfortable space between what it could have been and what it is.