Songbird

Our current context has often been a good source of inspiration for the cinema, provided that we know how to develop a real story in a realistic setting and place in it endearing characters who can give viewers a vision of themselves. While most movie theaters are still closed in the United States, or even completely closed in France, moviegoers have to rely on streaming platforms that very often offer quality new films (Disney +, Netflix and Amazon Pime Video) or video-on-demand releases, as is the case for this movie released last Friday in the United States and that will be released in France this Wednesday, December 16. One suspects that the global pandemic linked to the coronavirus was going to lead movie studios to propose science fiction movies in chaos, or even comedies as it was the case of the movie Connected by Romuald Boulanger recently broadcasted on Amazon Prime Video.

As much as the film's initial idea to shoot a movie in Los Angeles based on the premise that the pandemic had been so badly managed that many waves had followed one another and that most of the inhabitants of this metropolis could no longer leave their homes. covid 21 has also mutated several times to become covid 23, a virus that has become unmanageable and has meant that only some of the immunized people can continue to move between affluent residential areas and camps that are considered ghetto zones. We thus discover a courier, Nico Price (KJ Apa) who, being immunized, can make various deliveries and build a real network. In love with a young artist Sara Garcia (Sofia Carson) living with her grandmother in an apartment in the middle of the ghetto, Nico Price will have to find a way to save his beloved when she finds herself in a dangerous situation.

Songbird would have been a successful futuristic thriller if it had been based on a truly carefully crafted script and wasn't just an opportunistic film that wanted to be the first to be shot in Los Angeles in the midst of the pandemic. While the people of Los Angeles were truly confined, the abandoned streets of our referenced metropolis left a real end-of-the-world atmosphere. What could thus have been a real godsend for an inspired director could have given a disturbing and effective film, loses all its strength here, so much so that the staging lacks totally rhythm.

Despite an attractive casting in which we find in the main role the actor KJ Apa (Riverdale series, films The hate U give (2019), the last summer (2019), J'y crois encore (I still believe (2020)) and in the supporting roles notably Sofia Carson, Craig Robinson, Bradley Whitford and Demi Moore, Songbird doesn't succeed in convincing us for a single moment, notably by his lazy directing but above all by his script which is cruelly lacking in ideas and an attractive rhythm. While John Carpenter had given us a not very distant framework with his excellent New York 1997 (Escape from New York) (1981) and Danny Boyle 28 days later, we think that with a seasoned and invested director Songbird would have been quite different. This real disappointment risks going totally unnoticed or even being seen as quickly as forgotten. The only real quality of this movie seems to be its very short duration but this clearly shows the lack of ambition of this movie which is a simple marketing product totally missing its target.

Songbird
Directed by Adam Mason
Produced by Michael Bay, Marcei A. Brown, Jason Clark, Jeanette Volturno, Adam Goodman, Andrew Sugerman, Eben Davidson
Written by Adam Mason, Simon Boyes
Starring KJ Apa, Sofia Carson, Craig Robinson, Bradley Whitford, Peter Stormare, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Walter Hauser, Demi Moore
Music by Lorne Balfe
Cinematography : Jacques Jouffret
Edited by Geoffrey O'Brien
Production companies: Invisible Narratives, Platinum Dunes, Endeavor Content, ICM Partners, Catchlight Studios
Distributed by STXfilms (United States), Metropolitan Filmexport (France)
Release date: December 11, 2020 (United States)
Running time: 85 minutes

Seen on December 11 2020

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