Review of The Rhythm Section (2020) by Hnestlyonthesly — 02 Mar 2020

It's probably easier to talk about the things Friends and I liked about this movie since the list is so short. I first want to draw your attention, dear reader, to the fact that the trailer for this movie was very pretty. You too may have noticed the copious wigs that Blake Lively wears and think, hey, I haven't seen a good wig movie since Colossal--or wait, was it The Hustle? Did they both have Anne Hathaway in them? Am I confusing The Hustle with Hustlers? Is she also in American Hustle or is that Amy Adams? She's going to be the Head Witch in that Roald Dahl movie this fall. What's it called? The Witches, right--and if you were thinking that you too are probably the demo for this movie. The greatest strength of this movie, whose screenplay is written by the same person who authored the novel, is the central gimmick of the story: fish out of water/fish learns in extended first act how to do the broad strokes of assassin work/still occasionally makes mistakes/falls out of fishbowl. Lively's character is almost purposefully amateurish at action heroing, which leads to some important blunders early in the movie, like when she lets the probably maybe bomber who killed her family get away from his lunch and then go into hiding. Her inexperience creates the gritty aesthetic to all the fight scenes: an objective lens to violence, slow, and painful hits, brawls, and slugs to the stomach of disabled terrorists, the slapdash tumble in the bus. For Friends this was off-putting and I think for them it made her seem really dumb and clumsy, but I'm a fan of a good brawl in favor of the glossy, photoshopped, over-choreographed fight scenes of my youth typified by movies like The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Give me a Drunken Angel any day. (On this point, I will say that there are some movies that do a really great job of choreographing fight scenes in fresh ways like Sisters Brothers, where the drama isn't in the fight so much as the ability of those wielding such power to deal with the emotional consequences of their destruction, or even something like Birds of Prey, where the power of luck and accident is powerful and creates humor and tension in the fight. 1917, for all its faults and emptiness, wasn't shy about stripping bare the unromantic elements of warmaking. It would honestly be kind of fun to plot out on a graph all the movies of the past two years on a scale from completely choreographed, romantic to ultra-realistic.).

The car chase scene is also pretty lovely and a nice walk down memory lane for anyone who's been thirsty for Northern Africa since Only Lovers Left Alive. Thus ends the list of things we liked. I'm going to include a section for light criticism and questions at the bottom if you're in the mood to inform:

I lost track of the bombmaker toward the end of this movie in the scene where Blake breaks into his house but then is interrupted by the entrance of an unknown extra terrorist guy. When she shoots a bunch of people in that apartment, I honestly thought that she'd at that point completed her mission, and didn't even realize we were still looking for him on the bus. So when she gets to the bus and the wife with the suicide vest is there it feels really jarring, like someone's made an impossible phase shift or time has passed supernaturally quickly. Blake's major thing was being a linguist but she hardly speaks any other language than English. Most of her skills from "being top of her class at Oxford" don't seem to come in handy, which leads me to believe that we're all just a dead family away from showing up in the cheapest brothel imaginable. (Spoiler:) Sterling K Brown's disillusioned ex-CIA monologue was an intriguing look into the psyche of a broken agent, but once we get that he’s the villain it feels vapid and obvious. I liked him better when he was a sexy go-between. It also makes Jude Law's identity and the source of all of his information feel really unresolved at the end of this movie. Blake herself shouts at him through the phone during their winter sequence, "How could you know that? Who's giving you this information?" and I for one am also still not entirely sure how he has received all of these case-busting tips about currently active terrorist cells. Besides still wondering how Jude Law knows what he knows about U-17, is the spy he killed his wife or...? I kept waiting to be spoonfed the past relationship between him and the agent whose identity Blake is taking over, and then it never came, so I now feel pretty stupid about all of that backstory. Anyway, it will not live up to your expectations unless your expectations were that the first forty minutes are mostly really forgettable and that you could probably walk into the movie cold about three quarters of an hour in during the training sequence and still have a really fun time.