I did not really notice Kate Beckinsale in her first major role – which was the oddly named Hero in the Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing circa 1993. To be fair, how could you? The leads were Branagh as Benedick and Emma Thompson as Beatrice, and the chemistry between them was amazing. And then you had Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves and that guy from Dead Poet’s Society, along with Michael Keaton as Dogsberry, the comic relief.
And the role of Hero, let’s face it, is mostly as a passive victim of a malicious plot.
Apparently Keanu Reeves was besotted with Kate (although she did not requite), which does show that as well as being an all round nice guy and generous fellow, he also has excellent taste in women.
The role where I first fell in love with Kate Beckinsale was in 1996 when I enjoyed the limited cinema release of Cold Comfort Farm, where she had the lead role of Flora Poste. This time, despite an ensemble cast including Stephen Fry, Sir Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell, and Joanna Lumley, she was not overshadowed and her performance shone through.
I’ve seen a lot of her films in the intervening three decades. Shooting Fish was fun, although I did not like her cropped hair style, and her Hollywood debut was in the Whit Stilman arthouse The Last Days of Disco, where she costarred with Chloe Sevigny and was noted for her feud with the director (which did not stop them working together 20 years later on the Austen inspired regency comedy Love and Friendship).
Most of her early Hollywood roles were in big but disappointing films like Pearl Harbor (I only reluctantly adopt the American spelling for the latter word for verisimilitude), Serendipity (I’m a big John Cusack fan and happened to enjoy it even though it was a weak storyline), and Van Helsing, where she is a bodice wearing assistant vampire slayer.
Underworld was where she reinvented herself as an action heroine, playing Selene, a vampire enforcer with two hand guns blasting whilst wearing a tight black bodysuit. Rrrrrr. She returned for three sequels, and the internet buzz is that there is going to be another one soon, although I doubt that as it all seems to be an AI generated hoax.
Since then, she has been rather disappointing really. In Jolt, a straight to streaming action comedy which came out about 2 years ago, she played a rather manic and romantically challenged woman where an inability to manage her anger properly leaves her with quasi super powers of strength and endurance (as well as being rather stalky).
Canary Black, her latest offering, is even more disappointing. She plays a CIA agent who is forced by the kidnapping of her husband to go rogue. There are very many holes in the plot, and the script seems to have been written solely around the idea of Kate rushing around dressed in tight black outfits shooting everyone up.
Don’t get me wrong, I like watching Kate Beckinsale in black body suits as an action heroine.
But she seems to have fallen into a stereotype, and the early promise that was there in her incandescent performance in Cold Comfort Farm seems to have disappeared or been buried by type casting. She has become a rather boring (to be honest) action heroine in increasingly badly scripted and preposterous roles, rather than working to her original strengths in intelligent mildly comedic films.
Also, it appears from recent photos on the net that she seems to be trying to preserve her youthful looks with cosmetic treatments, which leave her looking rather plastic.
This saddens me.
Lost For Words! 