What I’m watching: a new terrorist thriller

Date: 4/29/2020

On Blu-ray and streaming: The Rhythm Section

I really wanted to like this film. I was in the mood for a thriller.

Blake Lively, its star, is in every scene and carries the film as best as she can, but a good performance cannot salvage a poor script.

Lively stars as Stephanie, a college student from a loving upper middle class home. Her parents and siblings were killed when terrorists detonated a bomb on a plane. Three years later, Stephanie is in London, smoking crack and working as a street prostitute.

An investigative journalist tracked her down and tells her he knows at least some of the people responsible for her family’s death. She resists his offer to help and is more interested in stealing from him and taking off for the streets.

When she returns to his apartment, she finds he has been murdered. Grabbing some of his notes, she heads off to Scotland to try to find the person who was his contact.

There she meets Iain (Jude Law), an apparently disgraced MI6 operative whose punishment is living alone outside of Inverness. He decides that he will train her so she can find the people responsible and kill them, something she eventually embraces.

She is posing as a legendary Russian assassin, an odd choice considering her lack of experience, and is now off to several foreign countries to track down the terrorists and kill them. There is no bringing them to justice. There is no interrogation to find out about their organizations. This is a simple revenge movie with the added bonus of something of a mystery.

So how many times have we seen properties in which a young woman is transformed into some sort of secret agent or killer? This isn’t original.

The filmmakers want us to believe that a young woman recovering from addiction and emotionally crippled by the horrific fate of her family is capable after three months of training.

The problem with this film is two-fold. The movie has terrible pacing for a thriller. Director Reed Moreno has worked primarily as a cinematographer and I’m sure she had a big hand in creating the look of the film. She has done a fair amount of work in the indie film world and it shows. This is a thriller that has much of the sensibilities of an art house drama. It is slow and deliberate in the first half of the movie.

I did like how Moreno staged the action sequences – they reflect the sloppiness of Stephanie and her lack of experience in hand-to-hand combat – and actually added a realism that was needed for the film.

The supporting cast does their best with the material with Law being relentlessly tough and demanding.

The end of the film implies strongly this film was the origin story for a series and that Stephanie now likes her new life. Both are over-reaches. There is no way this film will generate a sequel and the script doesn’t give us enough reasons for Stephanie to want to continue as a killer for hire.

Streaming on Hulu: The James Bond Library

I think the only Bond not represented in this collection is the most recent Bond, Daniel Craig. Otherwise you get Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.

This makes for an interesting binge experience to go back-to-back and see how the series and the character changed. I had never watched the first five Connery films – “Dr. No,” “From Russia With Love,” “Goldfinger,” “Thunderball” and “You’ll Only Live Twice” and decided to do a mini-binge myself.

Yes, I had never seen any of these films. I was too young to see them when they came out in theaters and somehow they had eluded me since then.

As a whole, they are truly artifacts of the 1960s and reflect in many ways the popular philosophies of the time. I was shocked at just what poorly made movies they are in so many ways.

Too many plot points weigh heavily on Bond’s ability to change some woman’s mind based solely on his sexual prowess. That’s right, the weight of the war rests on his technique with the ladies.

Wow.

“You’ll Only Live Twice” is perhaps the most appalling in how it treats the female characters. But hey, it’s okay because they are Japanese and they want men to feel superior, right? That’s what we are told.

I’m used to watching older films and understanding the era in which they were made will color their assessment today. I never imagined though just how embarrassing these films are today.

There are other things to binge and perhaps you would enjoy something else more.