(I’m not bothering with character names because, aside from the two leads, I literally couldn’t tell you the name of a single character in this film without looking it up.) You’ve got the grubby striver (Robinson) and the desperate mom (Moore) and the wide-eyed ingénue trapped in the City of Angels with nowhere to go (Daddario) and the wheelchair-bound vet who loves her (Hauser) and the liberal-with-a-heart-of-shit (Whitford) all intersecting with our disease-crossed lovers. Craig Robinson ( The Office) and Demi Moore ( Striptease) and Bradley Whitford ( The West Wing) and Alexandra Daddario ( True Detective) and Paul Walter Hauser ( Richard Jewell) round out the ensemble cast of characters, each embodying a different sort of person trying to get by in a crisis. With its ripped-from-the-headlines premise and its cheap, on-the-move style of filmmaking, it has all the hallmarks of something that would’ve run on drive-in screens and New York City’s less reputable screens back in the 1970s.īut the supporting cast here is top notch. Written in March after production shutdowns stymied the film industry and shot in an almost-guerrilla style that earned criticism from the Screen Actors Guild because the producers “have not been transparent about their safety protocols,” Songbird is, basically, a high-class exploitation film. Bike courier Nico (KJ Apa), whose immunity to the disease has earned him the epithet “munie” (like “mutie,” from X-Men, just one of the many derivative touches here), has to save his girlfriend Sara (Sofia Carson) from “Department of Sanitation” employees empowered by martial law to clean the streets of those infected by the disease with extreme prejudice.īiden hits MAGA Republicans hard, threatening to riot in the streets if your guy gets… Citizens are required to check in daily for health screenings via smartphone app those who show signs of the disease are sent to Q-zones so as to stop the spread of infection. Rather than a 99.98 percent survival rate, nearly half of those who catch the mutated form of COVID die, and pretty quickly at that. Set in the near future, a COVID-ravaged America has resorted to years of rolling lockdowns after the disease mutates and becomes far deadlier. It’s more Pain & Gain than Transformers, in other words.
Songbird review movie#
However, there is the signature choppy editing and a whole coterie of top-tier supporting actors and a slightly dark comic sensibility butting up to a movie that, honestly, kinda-sorta has something to say. Sure, there aren’t any massive explosions. Bay, after all, is merely the producer.īut if you say the phrase “Michael Bay COVID Movie” and then think about what that might entail, you might envision something a bit like Songbird. S ongbird is best-explained as “The Michael Bay COVID Movie.” This is not entirely fair to the actual director, Adam Mason, or the writers, Mason and Simon Boyes.
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