Movie Breakdown: The Rhythm Section (Noah)
Pre-Screening Ramble:
It’s a new venture by the producers of the Bond franchise directed by The Handmaid’s Tale’s Reed Morano. It’s got Jude Law and Blake Lively and Sterling K. Brown and looks to be a sort of gritty, realistic version of Taken. In truth, it sounds awesome. It’s also January, the month Hollywood spends throwing bags full of trash off the back of their trucks. The Rhythm Section just might be one of those bags of trash.
Post-Screening Ramble:
The Rhythm Section is a bleak trifle of a film. It isn’t good enough, or memorable enough to say much about, but it isn’t bad enough to make the viewing experience painful. Eon Films – the longstanding home of James Bond – has loudly stated that James Bond will never be a Jane Bond and so instead they’ve thrown their weight behind a Blake Lively vehicle with all of the elements of their favorite son bent and twisted, but still very much present. Lively plays Stephanie Patrick, a former top student at Oxford whose life is tossed down the shitter when her family is killed in a plane crash. Patrick has fallen far, a drug addicted sex worker who can barely muster the energy to be a sex worker. When a well-backed journalist approaches her with juicy claims (it was a bomb!) about the plane crash that killed her parents, Patrick slowly, and often poorly, becomes an avenging angel in search of those behind the act of terrorism. There’s an abbreviated, but enjoyable, training montage between her and former MI6 killer, Jude Law, as Patrick tries to learn the skills needed to enact her revenge. Patrick is sent on a series of missions, each drawing her closer to the truth, each become more entangled in the brutally overwritten plot until the film can’t support itself and sort of wet farts its way to an ending. Even if everything is pressure blasted with a layer of grit, Eon Films has a narrow view of what a spy film can be, and The Rhythm Section acts as a darker cousin of their first born child. Patrick is a broken lady-Bond, Jude Law a more violent M, Sterling K. Brown is Q if Q made all his money selling government secrets to terrorists and though the villain of the film is hard to pinpoint (and once you do, barely worth the effort) there is clearly a touch of the mustache-swirling evil doers of a good Bond film. It’s a different flavored stew, but all the ingredients are certainly there. Lively is clearly trying to reinvent herself in a role like this. Every action, every word, every moment of her portrayal of the gritty, honest, British Stephanie Patrick pulses with just how different this is than a normal Lively role. She isn’t bad, she’s just trying very, very hard and it is very, very obvious. By the end of the film, when plot twists the viewer couldn’t expect because there wasn’t a word spoken leading to their reveal and very PG-13 sex scenes are suddenly cluttering the background, the film has lost whatever dull sheen it may have started with. If Eon Films is trying to unearth their next Bond, Stephanie Patrick is sadly not it.
One Last Thought:
Lively’s Stephanie Patrick isn’t trained well (she basically just fights Jude Law in a kitchen and plods endlessly through a forest) and isn’t a good assassin. She either fails outright or doesn’t do what she’s told or just gets the living shit kicked out of her. And though I get it, she’s new at this, there’s very little growth from drug-addict to assassin and thus every mission is like watching the television when your four year old cousin is mashing the buttons on Grand Theft Auto.
