The Rhythm Section
- A boring revenge flick, that is only partly salvaged by Blake Lively’s acting performance.
Full Disclosure: January really is a wasteland in terms of new movie releases. I was mildly intrigued by the previews for The Rhythm Section, with Blake Lively in full on vigilante mode, but not exactly enthusiastic. After suffering through the doldrums of the January release schedule though, that’s all it took to get me to the theatre for this one.
Review
The very best revenge stories, dating all the way back to Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (the book, not the luke-warm movie adaptations) are about the internal cost that single-minded revenge carries with it. Even comic-book based revenge stories, like the Punisher franchise, delve into this subject matter. Unfortunately, The Rhythm Section has none of that. Blake Lively’s character, Stephanie, just wants revenge, and kind of stumbles into it. That’s basically the whole story.
When the movie opens, Stephanie is a drug-addict and working as a prostitute. Her life has obviously fallen apart after the death of her family in a plane crash. She’s approached by a freelance journalist, who tells her that the crash wasn’t an accident, but actually a terrorist attack, and that the intelligence services know this but are covering it up, for some reason that never really gets adequately explained over the course of the movie. When Stephanie attempts to approach the suspected bomb-maker, he gets spooked and the journalist is killed. Stephanie then tracks down the journalist’s contact, a former MI-6 agent, given the name “B”, played by Jude Law, who is living in seclusion in the Scottish Highlands.
After a few mandatory “you’re not cut out for this” scenes, where B rejects Stephanie’s attempts to solicit his help, her eventually trains her (sort of), and then tells her to pose as an assassin who he’s recently killed in order to get closer to the people behind the airplane bombing. This means working with former CIA officer Mark Serra, played by Sterling K. Brown, who apparently traffics information, and I guess also hands out assassin assignments from time to time. Honestly, it’s all a little unclear. The rest of the movie is basically just Stephanie sloppily killing a couple of people until she finds out who was really behind the airplane bombing, and then killing that person too.
Blake Lively as Stephanie. We don’t know much about her except that her family died and so now she wants to kill people.
The main problem with The Rhythm Section is that we don’t really care enough about Stephanie to follow her on what is a fairly boring journey. The only backstory of her previous life is told in flashback images, not even short scenes. There’s no dialogue, no action, nothing to really tell us what her life was like before the tragedy. I guess we’re supposed to infer that she liked her family, because they appear in most of the images, but aside from getting confirmation that her family existed, we learn nothing about her relationship with them. As for why she wasn’t on the plane with them, the only explanation is a single line of dialogue where she tells B, “I didn’t want to go.” Well great, glad we cleared that up.
None of the characters were fleshed out at all, and it made a lot of their actions bewildering. Out of all of the surviving loved ones of the crash victims, why did the journalist track down the crack addict/prostitute for help? Why did B, who we discover has his own reasons for being involved in this case, not just use his training to get the job done himself, instead of sending off someone much less qualified? Why does Serra do any of the things he does in the movie? We don’t really know, because we don’t know much of anything about these characters.
I also wasn’t a big fan of the way most of the movie was shot. There was a lot of handheld shaky camera work, where you can’t really tell what’s going on in the action sequences. This was compounded by the use of a really shallow depth of field on a lot of the shots, so that often the people with whom Stephanie interacts are out of focus. The overuse of handheld cameras is a pet peeve of mine. That said, it can sometimes be effective in order to put us in the mindset of the lead character, and give us a sense of what they’re going through (1917 being a perfect example of this). I’ll give the director (Reed Morano) the benefit of the doubt and say that’s what she was going for here. Unfortunately, in this case, we know so little about the character or what’s going on in the main plot that it just adds to the confusion.
The movie was saved from being entirely terrible by the acting performance of Blake Lively. I’ve been intrigued with some of her recent roles, most notably her excellent work in A Simple Favor. It seems she’s really hitting her stride as an actor, and she’s quite good here, although I wish she had a little more to work with. What she did was excellent, but this role really limited her options. She was either desperate and sad, or determined and sad. There wasn’t much else there. Still, she was basically the only reason to watch the movie.
Spoilers Ahead
Stephanie with B, who definitely needs to go down as one of the worst mentors and trainers of all time.
Alright, so it turns out that Serra was the one behind the bombing all along, although his motivations seem to change with every scene. In one moment, he’s explaining that he left the CIA because he starting doing things that he wasn’t comfortable with, but then we find out that he’s the middle man who runs terrorist cells. But we’re not given any indication that he espouses any terrorist ideology, so we’re left to believe that he just does it for the money. But after Stephanie kills him, the news report names him as a “philanthropist”.
The movie also makes a confusing mess of the backstory of the airplane explosion. Apparently, it was ordered by a radical Islamist cleric in order to kill one reform-minded activist on the plane, and send a message. But we’re then told that the cleric was killed in a drone strike. So why is Serra still planning bombing attacks? None of this makes any sense.
The character of B also has a bit of a confusing send off. By the end of the movie, he’s back in MI-6’s good graces. It seems that he’s made amends for his previous mistake (when he killed the assassin who was supposed to kill Serra, but he didn’t know it was Serra), even though he didn’t really do anything, Stephanie did.
Aside from all of the confusing plot details and baffling character decisions, the main problem with The Rhythm Section is that, frankly, it’s kind of boring. The John Wick movies have shown that you can make a revenge flick without delving into the moral issues of retribution, and still have that movie be captivating and exciting. The Rhythm Section is no John Wick.
Stephanie wearing a disguise! Here she’s on her way to kill someone else for reasons that are unclear.
5 Quick Hits
There were weird song choices throughout, just tonally out of sync with whatever was going on in the movie at any one time. It’s like they had a list of songs they wanted to get into the movie, and just crammed them in at random places where they thought a lyric had something to do with what was happening. Honestly, whatever the producers paid in royalties to use these songs was a waste of money.
One positive: scenes set in the Scottish Highlands. I’m all in favour of more movies filming in the Highlands.
With the exception of one quick discussion, every scene was either action or two people talking. The Two Popes proved that you can have scenes that consist only of two people talking that keep the audience engaged. Unfortunately here, there was just nothing interesting about any of the dialogue. The best line is one shown in the trailer, when Stephanie tells B that she has nothing left to lose, and he asks her “what about your life?” “What about it?” is her response. The movie needed much more of this.
Jude Law’s character is the worst trainer of all time. His fight “training” was basically just rushing at her and forcing her to defend herself (no teaching of techniques or anything), and her firearms training was apparently completed after she was barely able to shoot him in his ballistic vest. Good job coach.
Often movie titles spring up organically from the story. With “The Rhythm Section”, it seems as though the writer just randomly wrote a line of dialogue for Jude Law’s character, where he makes some half-assed analogy, in order to come up with a title. It seemed like a strange title when I first heard it, and now that I know what it means, it just seems weak.
