The female assassin is one of those mythical creatures that, like Hobbits and magazine journalists who live in spacious Manhattan lofts, seem to exist much more in movies than in the real world.
Or at least the ones that look likeBlake Livelydo thoughThe Rhythm Sectiondoes everything it can to un-beautify her for the first half of the film: skin pallid and bruised, eyes hollow, lank hair chopped off into a greasy bob.
Her Stephanie was once bright-eyed and whole, until a terrorist cell blew up the airplane containing her parents and two siblings.
Bernard Walsh/Paramount Pictures
She should have been on the flight but wasn’t; now she’s a shabby prostitute and heroin addict, barely conscious enough to serve her customers (a steep downslope the setup does almost nothing to explain beyond an implied shrug of “because grief”).
When a customer comes in claiming he only wants to talk, she quickly has him kicked out; he’s insistent though, and manages to tell her that he knows who the players are in the vast conspiracy that he claims took the plane down.
How she processes that information and comes to mold herself into a sort of DIY assassin with the help of a former MI6 agent played by a paycheck-cashingJude Lawis the gist of the plot, which should reasonably be a lot more enjoyable than it is.
Unfortunately, director Reed Morano (who won an Emmy for her brilliant handling of the opening three episodes ofHandmaid’s Tale’sfirst season) never quite seems to find her tone; the story is neither stylized bone-crunching camp, a la the giddy 2017Charlize TheronvehicleAtomic Blonde, nor a filled-out psychological portrait like the stylish 1990La Femme Nikita.
Lively digs gamely into the grit of her character, but there’s so little heft behind the script that she often comes across as sullen, or just painfully clueless.
(The story also makes her British, though you’d only know it every third or fourth word.)
The fight scenes, at least, are realistically messy for a young woman with no experience who also happens to be a recently recovering addict; she’s lucky, but she’s not superhuman.
As the action jumps between exotic locales London, Tangiers, Madrid, Marseilles it picks up a few new characters too, includingSterling K. Brownas an ex-CIA agent with great taste in vacation homes.
In the second half, the movie even manages a few rare moments of visceral thrill, and even something like catharsis.
But nothing ever quite gels; instead, the story just keeps banging toward its bloody conclusion, always a little off the beat.C
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