movie review

Diminutive Blonde Has an Incomprehensible Plot, But the Action Is Admittedly Groovy

Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde. Photo: Focus Features

As with so many things, what you get from Diminutive Blonde depends on what you look for. You lot'll find no satisfaction if you go in hoping for a good yarn, since the movie is a hash of unmarried, double, and triple crosses, and the motives of the ultimate villain plough out to be incomprehensible. (The graphic novel on which the movie is based, The Coldest City, is no help.) Nor — although the film is lousy with spies and set up in Berlin on the week that the wall falls — is at that place much in the way of a chilling-paranoid, John le Carré–like mood. The dialogue is snappy without any particular bite. The actors, with a couple of exceptions, are simply functional. But you don't go to operas for dancing or ballets for singing, and yous don't run into Atomic Blonde for anything only a badass female protagonist crunching basic and pulping faces in gratifyingly long takes or remarkable simulations thereof. The auteur here is literally the stunt human being.

A stunt man, rather, who has punched and kicked and kung-fu'ed his way up the food chain. His name is David Leitch, and his directing work in Atomic Blonde amounts to a stunt-person's manifesto, which is also a rebuke to all those Marvel or DC movies in which the camera is then close that you can't see whose fist is connecting with whose chin, the activity is hacked into tiny bits, and the whole mess is run through a computer with the aim of concealing the seams. (Partly this is because Western stars — being either too clumsy or too expensive to maim or impale, or both — must be protected in the editing room.) At that place is certainly editing (and computer enhancement) in Diminutive Blonde, but Leitch has a fetish for full bodies at full extension, and whenever Charlize Theron's agent Lorraine Broughton finds herself confronting the bodily or metaphorical wall, the camera pulls back to show the whole playing area, and you tin most hear the director weep, "Fix … set … PUMMEL!"

The result is absolutely neat. "Charlize Theron makes all other action heroes look like wimps!" screams a poster over Times Foursquare, the quote courtesy of Rolling Stone in a blurb contrived to please equal-rights advocates, feminists, and perchance masochistic males. It does ignore the fact that Hong Kong activity heroines have been kicking male butt for nearly half a century, that Uma Thurman was no slouch in the Impale Bill films, and that Gina Carano did all her own fighting in Haywire. Merely the latter film is instructive: Director Steven Soderbergh made a point of letting Carano do her mixed-martial-arts thing in long takes, but Soderbergh tends to ration himself to ane big idea per movie and then stick to it like a graduate educatee bent on proving a thesis — and and so Carano's action scenes (impressive every bit they were) looked like the mean solar day's rushes before the editor had a adventure to dial them up. In Atomic Blonde, the photographic camera doesn't stand at a respectful distance. It swerves and hurtles and all but throws punches of its own. It'southward an audience member and a participant.

Atomic Blonde'due south showstopper fight scene volition be ogled for decades to come. A false unmarried accept that looks uncannily réal, it opens with a visibly anxious Lorraine positioning her gun as she rides a rickety elevator, knowing that when the doors open she'll have to brainstorm shooting — and punching, boot, stabbing, etc. What follows is a series of whiplash moves that make us feel as if nosotros're in a giant pinball machine with ear-pummeling sound effects being bashed against 1 abutment subsequently another while falling toward the abyss. Here is the best part of Theron'south performance: She doesn't await equally if her moves have been choreographed down to the smallest twitch. You run into in her optics the mark of a true hero: fear being elbowed aside by sheer determination not to dice (or neglect). It would have been fun to be in the room with Leitch and his crew when they viewed their finished scene and thought, "How could we accept done that any better?" They couldn't have — but they might have considered not making the residual of the movie then heavy and tedious that we're practically salivating for more than people to get royally wasted.

For the sake of completeness, I should note that there is enough of plot but picayune in the way of clarity. Amusement writers drastic for a hook take called Theron's Broughton "a female Bond." Yes, she is nominally a British hugger-mugger agent who wears sleek outfits and beds a cute woman (a rival agent), but the original Bond characterization is rooted in class (and colonialist and sexual) privilege, as well as the sense that an entire nation'due south super-technology is firmly in place behind a gear up of firm Institution values. The world of Atomic Blonde is — at to the lowest degree until its coda — a nihilist'south vision of competing psychopaths, greed heads, and imperialists, and the heroine is mainly (by pattern) inscrutable. Noble values of a sort reassert themselves in the terminal moments just don't do much to dispel the dour vibes. (The cynical ending of the graphic novel fits the fabric ameliorate merely is almost as stupid.)

Leitch and his French cinematographer Jonathan Sela try to achieve a distinctive wait: washed-out Cold War exteriors with Theron's white-blonde hair and shiny, thigh-loftier blackness boots supplying the glow. The soundtrack is '80s Europop like "99 Luftballoons" along with a bit of Bowie and "Der Kommissar." (A couple of times we hear the opening of Til Tuesday's "Voices Deport" but I don't recall the chorus ever coming.) As a CIA higher-upward, John Goodman tin be sour without losing his comic timing and James McAvoy tin can be murderous without losing his springy adorableness. Eddie Marsan has a few dear moments every bit the repository of the picture'due south McGuffin. Only apart from Theron, the only actor who fully registers is Sofia Boutella as the French operative who fires Lorraine's loins (and vice versa). Boutella is best known for her exotic aliens and/or killers in Kingsman: The Secret Service, Star Trek Beyond, and The Mummy, and it's nice to see that she doesn't demand bizarre makeup or limb-lopping appendages to make you lot want to watch her. But Atomic Blonde knocks aside that human relationship with the same unmarried-mindedness that makes the film, finally, so uninteresting.

Atomic Blonde Has a Messy Plot, But the Action Is Smashing