Review: Atomic Blonde Is Unexploded Ordnance
- Jul 30, 2017
- 2 min read
Like unexploded ordnance, Atomic Blonde has you waiting for something to blow up, but it never happens. Charlize Theron plays an underdeveloped character in an unpolished movie with an uninteresting plot full of nonsensical twists.
Top-level MI6 agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron) is dispatched to Berlin days before the fall of the Berlin Wall to retrieve a list of every KGB agent in the Soviet Union, and assassinate a double agent known as Satchel. She meets her contact David Percival (James McAvoy) who is also looking for the list, and begins to suspect him of being Satchel. She also meets a French agent named Delphine (Sofia Boutella) and "makes contact" in more ways than one, attempting to gain information.
This is one of those films that tells the story slightly out of order, and completely messes everything up by doing so. From the very start of the film, the story is being told in an interrogation by Lorraine, so the viewer is never worried that she'll die. This is also completely unnecessary, used mostly as filler content, and breaks the flow of the story more than once.
Also, nothing happens for a great deal of the film. Even though it's set in a politically charged setting, the plot is way too focussed on the politics of the spy business. It's not even enjoyable for hardcore spy fans who are there to watch a movie about international relations. And every second scene features Charlize back in her apartment in various states of undress. For a 41-year-old woman, she truly brings the sensuality this movie was aiming for, and one particular scene may just be one of the best sex scenes ever filmed. I just wish that they wouldn't keep interrupting the movie by forcing their sensuality down the viewer's throat.
So you've cut out the interview scenes, the sexy scenes, and the politics. What are you left with? An hour of film with stupidly overstylized imagery, two terrible "plot twists" in a row, and very little action. The one action scene I can actually remember was pretty good, and it's cool to see a fairly realistic portrayal of how a trained woman fights big burly dudes - with great difficulty, and by throwing her entire weight into it. But it's not particularly interesting action, especially considering this movie's close connections with John Wick.
Charlize Theron is great in this role - she's dedicated to the training and the character. It's just too bad that there is hardly any character to be dedicated to, thanks to terrible writing which matches the directing and the pacing. It feels like a solid creative vision was stolen and reimagined by people who enjoyed Suicide Squad, and then the script was folded into a Möbius strip.
Comments