Item: Songbird
Rating: 2
Author: Matt Rooney

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

PLOT: In the year 2024, the COVID-23 virus has mutated beyond control, and in the midst of the chaos a young man tries to save his girlfriend from evil health officials who are coming to take her and her sick grandmother away.

REVIEW: Songbird – produced by Michael Bay and starring a cast made up of actors who are all far too good for this material – is the worst example of art imitating life in recent memory. Here we are, in the midst of a global pandemic that has left over a million (and counting) dead, and along comes this movie that proves that at some point the people involved thought it would be a good idea to crudely romanticize this very real and scary scenario – not to mention pander to conspiracy theorists who likely view it all as a hoax – with an ugly, ludicrous thriller that offers nothing more than a horrible example of what it looks like when people with money try to kill some time during a quarantine.

It would be forgivable if Songbird were at least a well-made, if still misguided, pandemic thriller, but what makes the movie such an excruciating experience to watch is how its blatantly irresponsible premise is matched by its inept construction. Conceived by director/co-written Adam Mason and co-writer Simon Boyes during the early period of this year’s ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, Songbird takes place four years after the outbreak of COVID-23, mutating into something uncontrollable and requiring government agencies to stick infected people in “Q-zones”, leaving the streets of LA empty and destitute, with our main characters seemingly the only ones left around. Instead of opening on the genre-standard news feeds acting as a sort of montage for the spiral of the virus, Songbird instead goes the internet troll route and focuses early minutes on conspiracy videos filled with talking heads going off about the virus and the folly of the government, who here are rounding up sick people and forcing them into quarantine camps.

If that sounds like the writers decided to take the alarmist approach to pandemic filmmaking, that’s because they are. While viral outbreak movies are a staple of horror/sci-fi/thrillers, Mason and Boyes shamelessly decided to take advantage of current, real fears and anxieties by illustrating an uncontrolled pandemic where the villains are the government and health officials – here in the form of the Department of Sanitation, led by an especially surly Peter Stormare – who want to keep you locked in your homes and take you away should you get sick. Of all the potential stories to tell about what living through this year has been like for many, it defies logic that this final project – one that caters only to the most agitated and upset by how they have to wear a mask to the grocery store – was the one that was given the green light.

Of course, that’s just one chunk of this mess, and it's when the story keeps going that we’re given the whole trough. Amid a tangled web of thinly-written, mostly appalling characters is Nico (KJ Apa, Riverdale), a slick, immune delivery man who works for second-rate delivery service (ran by Craig Robinson), because Apple exists but not Amazon. He’s roguish and loves to literally give the middle finger to authority, and loves, even more, to speed around on his motorcycle and has no qualms with showering outdoors (you know, relatable quarantine everyman stuff). He has his lady love, Sara (Sofia Carson), whom he can only see via FaceTime, and we know they love each other by how much of their conversations are banter. But after Sara’s grandmother gets sick, and both are threatened to be taken away by Peter Stormare, Nico tosses on his leather jacket, hops on his bike and speeds around town to get some “immunity passes” to get them out of Dodge – because again – the gun-totting health officials are coming to get them.

Surely the filmmakers ask audiences for the benefit of the doubt when it comes to quality, having cobbled together this movie from conception to completion so quickly. But, considering this movie, of all movies, definitely did not need to be made, it in fact makes it more important that everything at least looks and moves well enough to justify its existence, especially tackling such topical subject matter. It doesn’t. Choppy editing means everything moves at an incomprehensive pace, and sloppy camerawork makes it look like Mason was actively trying to avoid six-foot social distancing by shoving the lens in everyone’s faces. As well, the fact that shooting locations were clearly limited to confined spaces and having to work with the concept of characters quarantining, the aim to try and make something claustrophobic instead plays out with a madhouse effect, where the story bounces between the same rooms without rhyme or reason, trying to lace these characters together in a slapdash way. Even if there's a crumb of a mainline, race-against-the-clock story, the fact it is so threadbare makes the movie as a whole seems so much more ludicrous when it's obvious how important the filmmakers seem to think everything they're doing is. There's a sense they think they're making the ultimate COVID movie when really it's just a garden-variety, dumb thriller.

As for the actors, it’s hard to really blame them for any of this. On top of the aforementioned, there’s Demi Moore and Bradley Whitford as immunity bracelet smugglers and Worst Couple of the Year nominees and; Alexandra Daddario as a musician, May, playing for paying fans online, and Paul Walter Hauser and a lonely former solider/tech guy, Michael, who sends her a few dollars. Together, the latter duo is playing out a shoehorned storyline that aims to exist as a way to encapsulate all of our collective loneliness at this time, but really plays out more like a blatant fantasy for anyone who has pined over social media star. I can imagine why they signed up for their roles – perhaps out of boredom or thinking they were becoming involved in something topical and edgy – but either way, they should have just stayed home and dug into some puzzles. All of them are too good for these characters, trying to give some energy and life to one-dimensional traits that range, individually, from sad, to scared and to, in the case of Whitford and Stormare, downright abhorrent. All of their storylines could make for interesting projects on their own (particularly between Sara and her grandmother), and there is even trace amounts of heart, but in this jumbled 80-minute mess that wants to be more exciting and scary than anything else, each thread is slammed together for one unappealing segment after another where connecting with the characters is damn-near impossible. .

Songbird can’t settle for just being a bad movie; it has to be an insulting one too. There’s no way this movie was going to offer anything new to the pandemic thriller other than relevancy, and instead, it’s gimmicky, pandering and insensitive. But that’s just surface level. At its worst, default setting, Songbird panders to the worst fears of those genuinely scared of a literal, active pandemic and caters to the hair-brained conspiracies of those who couldn’t take it less seriously. At it’s best, it’s a disposable, bargain-bin thriller that, during a normal year, may have been lucky to be a Redbox exclusive.