
Some of Nico's most consistent customers are the wealthy Griffins, a couple played by Demi Moore and Bradley Whitford (doing yet another effective variation on his Get Out character). Now working for a semi-shady delivery company owned by Lester ( The Office's Craig Robinson) and logs hours on his phone chatting with his non-immune girlfriend Sara (Sofia Carson). The movie's protagonist, Nico ( Riverdale's KJ Apa), is one of the "munies" who was paying his way through law school as a motorcycle-loving courier when the pandemic upended his life.
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The city of Los Angeles remains in full lockdown mode, enforced by gun-wielding bureaucrats from the Department of Sanitation, and only select immune individuals, referred to as "munies" and outfitted with yellow digital ID wristbands, are allowed to move freely through the empty streets. In Songbird's bleak version of 2024, the planet has moved beyond COVID-19 to COVID-23, which has claimed over 8 million lives.
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Like many of the films produced under his Platinum Dunes banner, the movie has a sleek, car commercial look filled with splashes of white light there's also a conspiratorial bent to the script, which was co-written by Simon Boyes and director Adam Mason. Surprisingly, Songbird could use a bit more of Bay's obnoxious sensibility. As a producer, he's mostly specialized in grisly horror remakes. This is the filmmaker who sent a drill-team to blow up a 600-mile wide asteroid in Armageddon and put giant balls on a robot in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Again, this is a Michael Bay-produced movie about a global pandemic that's already claimed the lives of over 1.5 million people and continues to worsen as winter grinds on. If this type of nakedly cynical filmmaking automatically repulses you-and judging from the number of "too soon" reactions I've seen to the idea of the movie's apocalyptic premise, that's a fairly widespread response- Songbird will be a grueling hang, even with a brisk 84-minute runtime. Your enjoyment of Songbird likely depends on the type of audible reaction the "fake news" line elicits: Do you unleash a yelp of laughter or a groan of exhaustion? It's the slim, incalculable difference between a "lmao" and a "smh." The line arrives during the requisite doom-soaked montage of dystopian imagery, blurry news footage, and fired-up social media testimonials that often kick off tales of societal collapse.


"Remember the good old days of fake news? Real news is worse." Those words are spoken early on in Songbird, the Michael Bay-produced COVID-sploitation thriller and the " first film to shoot in L.A." since the beginning of the pandemic.
