Review of The Rhythm Section (2020) by Chrismizerak — 01 Feb 2020

I personally haven’t seen much of Blake Lively’s acting work in general, a distinction that will eventually be rectified. I did enjoy Lively a lot in “A Simple Favor” from a few years back in which she acted opposite Anna Hendrick.

But even with the limited experience I have with her portfolio, I genuinely like Blake Lively. She is very stylish and influential in the fashion world. She loves to cook and even does plenty of baking in her spare time.

I even follow Blake Lively on Instagram, hence why I know she’s into culinary arts. Overall, she seems pretty cool and shows a laidback and natural personality that makes it easy for me to get behind.

She was certainly the main reason and maybe the only reason why I decided to check out her latest film, “The Rhythm Section”. If you think about it, this is a rather odd name for a thriller of this kind.

Right away, the best thing I can say about this film is that Blake Lively gives all her strongest efforts to make her role work and it doesn’t go unnoticed. Lively does her part in putting as much personality as she can get for her leading role as written and directed.

The film as a whole unfortunately is only half-baked at best from both a conceptual and executional perspective. As best as I can describe it strictly off the cuffs, the plot centers on a young woman, played by Lively, whose family died in a tragic plane accident a few years ago.

Under her emotional grieving, she becomes a prostitute for reasons not very well explained. In fact, I don’t even recall there even being a reason. One day, she comes across a mysterious man who informs her that the aforementioned plane accident was actually a terrorist attack.

After said stranger is killed off from someone related to the incident, this woman decides to look up a connection that may help her solve this developing case. Her travels lead her to Dublin where a secret assassin, played by Jude Law, takes her captive and eventually trains her to become an assassin, again for reasoning I’m still unable to comprehend.

And the rest of the film consists of her going after these targets and fulfilling her mission or missions depending on how you look at it. Notice my uncertainty and confusion over what the plot is about, even though I’ve simplified it to the best of my ability? That’s because the biggest problem with this film, that in my opinion hurts the film the most, is its lack of proper character development or any assemblage of world building.

The film’s direction in the first half specifically is confused, as if they weren’t sure about what kind of film this was going to be. It’s never clear what our lead has been doing in the years since the plane accident.

I don’t know why she ended up being a prostitute before she goes on this central crusade, even though she could have arguably found a better circumstance for herself anywhere else. It doesn’t make sense why Jude Law treating Blake Lively like a prisoner is considered a charming/quirky character trait or a method to his bizarre training.

The film fails to explain many abrupt or random details like the ones I described. The aspect of the film that best summarizes the experience in a nutshell would have to be the music. You see, it’s done well, but at times it feels a tad inappropriate for the situation at hand.

The potential is there, I’m just not sure that it’s utilized correctly. And that’s my dominant sentiment towards “The Rhythm Section” and why I’m giving it the score that I am. There are inspired tidbits every once in a while.

Lively has an amusing counterattack in her training with Law when he’s training for a heated car chase, she puts one car in reverse that’s easily the funniest part of the film. There’s also a car chase that Lively finds herself in where it all takes place within one shot and you’re looking from the perspective of the co-pilot seat.

You see all the angles you want to see from the front to the back to the driver. This makes the chase sequence more convincing and I at least appreciate that scene for what it is. There at times later on in the film where I’m thinking to myself, I could see individual things such as Blake Lively as an action heroine and a few choice scenes working better if the film surrounding them were more carefully constructed.

As it is though, “The Rhythm Section” is a regrettably half-baked product were some of the ingredients mesh together fine at the expense of an incomplete script and an indecisive vision.