The Rhythm Section
Filmmakers seem endlessly fascinated with the idea of beautiful, seductive women who are trained as assassins. From La Femme Nikita (1990) to last year’s Anna (both from French filmmaker Luc Besson), it seems like we get one or two of these movies a year. Whether as ridiculous as Red Sparrow or as epic as the Kill Bill movies, these films are almost always from male writers and directors.
But not the new movie The Rhythm Section. It may be based on a male writer’s novel (Mark Burnell also did the screenplay), but the director is a woman, Reed Morano, an experienced cinematographer who caught a break as a director on the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale. So what’s different? Well, this may be the first female assassin movie in which the gal with a gun just isn’t very good at her job.
Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) also gets a lot more time than most to express her anguish, a nonstop misery that began when her parents and siblings were killed in an airline disaster, taking her from a comfortable middle class existence to a life of drugs and (of course) prostitution. In fact, she gets so much time to emote that the movie sputters early on, not really developing a propulsive pace until the appearance of an ex-spy (of course) known only as B (Jude Law). For reasons never entirely clear, B decides to train Stephanie as an assassin to kill the terrorists associated with the plane bombing that killed her family.
From there Stephanie travels to Madrid and Marseilles and other James Bond-like locales (the film shares the Bond films’ producers), where nothing ever goes quite as planned. B hooks her up with Mark (Sterling K. Brown), who directs her to her targets and (of course) puts the moves on her.
Morano’s cinematography credentials are evident in the creative ways she shoots many of the action scenes, including a hectic chase through narrow streets seen entirely from the passenger seat of Stephanie’s car. The problem is, the targets are cardboard figures of mostly dubious connection to the bombing, which, combined with Stephanie’s missteps, drains the assassination attempts of thrills apart from a detached admiration of the filmmaking.
The central figure is a terrorist-for-hire dubbed U-17 whom no one has ever identified, which (of course) narrows the possibilities to the characters Stephanie has already encountered. This leads to a final confrontation just as muted as all those that have gone before.
Lively is an underrated leading lady, who has been terrific in both romantic (The Age of Adaline) and pure action movies (The Shallows), as well as in at least one arch action-comedy (A Simple Favor). She acts up a storm in The Rhythm Section (the awful title, which has something to do with controlled breathing when shooting a gun, is not doing the movie any favors in attracting viewers). But her admirable vulnerability is at cross purposes with the movie’s action mandate. Instead of humanizing the female assassin trope, as Morano clearly intends, Stephanie’s fragility just exposes the absurdity of the premise: No one in their right minds would send this woman on a spy mission. With that core flaw, all the other credibility questions — how is it she appears to take a bus from New York to Madrid? — pile up and crush the movie’s already shaky revenge plot line.
Grade: C-plus. Rated R. Playing at the AMC River Hills, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.
(Photo: Jose Hero/© 2018 EON Productions Ltd.)
