Blake Lively turns assassin in dopey 'Rhythm Section'
Barbara VanDenburgh, Arizona Republic, USA TODAY NETWORK - ARIZONA
What if you combined the protagonists of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "La Femme Nikita," robbed them of all punk and charm and made the resulting character deliver all her dialogue in Blake Lively's attempt at a British accent?
You'd end up with Stephanie Patrick, the heroine of "The Rhythm Section," a thriller adapted from a series of books by author Mark Burnell and produced by Barbara Broccoli, legendary longtime producer of the James Bond franchise. If Broccoli is angling for another multibillion-dollar franchise, she won't find it in this oppressively glum thriller.
We meet Stephanie as a bruised, battered and drug-addicted prostitute, reduced to bones by smack a few years after her family died in a horrendous plane crash. The life she lost was a generically idyllic one, we are given to understand in glimpses of gauzy flashbacks that aren't enough for us to mourn its loss. She is well on her way to an early grave when she is approached by a freelance journalist with a bomb to drop (so to speak) on the rubble of her life: Her parents' plane crash wasn't due to mechanical failure, as reported. It was a radical Islamic terrorist attack, and the government is covering it up.
More:'Gretel & Hansel' puts the dread in dreadful
More:Jewish faith, music central to tedious 'Song of Names'
That revelation kicks off a series of far-fetched character decisions and plot twists, starting with Stephanie hunting down one of the reporter's mysterious contacts on a remote compound in Scotland, an ex-MI6 loner played by Jude Law, who inexplicably begins training a strung-out Stephanie in a junkie Rocky montage to become an assassin, capable of visiting vengeance upon all those involved in the plot that killed her family. "You're a cliché," he admonishes Stephanie. The film's lack of self-awareness is stunning.
It's a silly setup that the film takes deadly seriously, to its peril, and one so enormously geopolitical that, despite the dead family, there are no real personal stakes.
"The Rhythm Section" has dire little levity. The camera work is jittery and restless, the atmosphere suffocatingly dingy. The film only sparks to brief life when the story takes a back seat, giving a handful of well-choreographed fight and chase sequences the spotlight. It's nice, too, that Stephanie is a pretty bad assassin at first, that she's awkward and afraid and unsure of herself, as any of us would be.
It's a refreshingly human touch in a movie that has precious few of them.
'The Rhythm Section'
out of four stars
Rated R; violence, sexual content, language, drug use.