I’ve been seeing the trailer for The Rhythm Section for a few months now. All I got out of it was actress Blake Lively was made up to look as ugly as possible while still be recognizable. Jude Law and Sterling K. Brown were there, and some moody song was playing over it. Obviously, there was more to the movie than that, but would it be any good?
It came out in January, so the odds weren’t good, but sometimes a gem comes out this early in the year.
Now that I have seen the movie, I can say that, no, this is not some secret January gem. This movie, well, it has some problems.
Lively stars as Stephanie Patrick, who I think is British, but that comes down to Lively’s now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t accent. Why not hire an actual British actress? There are a lot of them out there. Anyway, after a brief look ahead to a near-kill, we cut back to eight months earlier. Stephanie is working as a prostitute at a seedy-looking London-based brothel, doing drugs and having flashbacks to a happy family life with her brother, sister, and parents. They all died in a plane crash.
Only, as a crusading journalist named Proctor (Raza Jaffrey) reveals, not only was the crash not a crash but an act of terrorism, but the bombmaker is alive and well, living in London with the full knowledge of the country’s intelligence services. Stephanie, knowing this, does a few things to make matter worse and ends up going to see Proctor’s former Mi6 contact, a man he knows only as B (Jude Law). From there, Stephanie learns to kill under B’s tutelage in order to take out all the people responsible for the bombing despite B’s point that killing anyone won’t make her feel better.
So, here’s a question: why do Proctor and B both take her in? She’s a strung-out drug addict with no experience in, well, anything. She doesn’t know anything. She’s just…there. I think John Madden said it right on The Simpsons.
It’s not like she’s any good at killing people either. Much of what she does makes things worse, but somehow people keep trusting her. Furthermore, she may have a romantic relationship going with former CIA operative Marc Serra (Sterling K Brown). Except, she and Brown don’t really have many scenes together. And then there are the occasional short bursts of rock music. Granted, the music is probably supposed to tie into the title because “rhythm section” is how B says a potential assassin needs to set his or her mind to do the job.
Director Reed Morano got his start as a cinematographer, and it somewhat shows. As much as the script (written by Mark Burnell based off his own novel) doesn’t really make sense in places, Morana does at least compose some really good shots in this movie. Law also does a decent job with his role, but there really isn’t much to recommend here. For an action revenge story, it’s remarkably dull more than anything else.
Grade: C-
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