Songbird is a curious film that could have been renamed “Well, I guess it could have been worse?”. The film was made during lockdown and is no small, web-cam-focused film like Host was. It’s produced by Michael Bay and uses a number of name-brand actors like Demi Moore, Alexandra Daddario, Craig Robinson, Peter Stormare, and Bradly Whitford. Many of them are clearly filmed separately but the film still manages to have a wide scope as its filmed throughout L.A. Even *gasp* outside! <insert dramatic music here>

Set in the near future, the film is about Covid-23, a mutated coronavirus with a 54% mortality rate. The world has been in lockdown for four years and the only people allowed outside of their homes are the small percentage of immune (and the government health care workers / armed patrols). The movie follows a host of regular people just trying to manage and survive this sad new world.

The film can best be described as the Crash of pandemic movies… it’s about a large number of independent and semi-independent stories that intermingle and connect over time. Unfortunately, the movie barely hits 90 minutes and doesn’t have the time to actually do this kind of film right. Some of the characters get far more focus leaving others and their subplots weirdly unnecessary while also being overly-dramatic. Hard to care regardless of how melodramatic and insistent the overproduced score tell us to be.

The funny thing is though, it is at least well produced and shot and the opening act is pretty good. As a film providing a What If scenario, it does some solid world-building as it bounces between the various people just showing us their lives. The acting and writing are solid as we get tender scenes between characters that simply lacks the bombast they blast us with later in the film. Too bad the movie has to find a plot in some really overblown and remarkably stupid scenes.

One could argue this movie is tastelessly opportunistic and that it trades on the life and death or real people in this stupid year. For me, it’s just an opportunity for a What If scenario that movies have always done. If this flick had been better, had maintained its grounded emotional honesty of the first act and continued to tell a story of society on the verge, it’d have been worth watching. But the closer it gets to its melodrama and the need to tell a romance-tinged action adventure with mustache-twirling baddies, the dumber, more overwrought, and boring it gets.

Score: 69