“What if Debbie Harry had been a British spy in the run up to the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is the entire basis of Atomic Blonde‘s derivative Tinker-Tailor hokum meets video-rental exploitation, with Charlize Theron alternately looking magazine-cover cool or battered senseless in gratuitously over-the-top action sequences. It’s hardly feminism’s finest moment.
Throw in some faux-lesbian scenes with Sofia Boutella, James Macavoy as the decidedly dodgy geezer with a buzzcut and DDR greatcoat, Toby Jones as a shifty spymaster and John Goodman as the equally dubious CIA man and what we have is a well-executed but disposable spy-thriller in which Charlize gets leered at by the camera throughout.
Now that the eighties are suitably period and suitably naff in the fashion stakes, we have an extensive, affectionate, but unsubtle jukebox soundtrack (based, it seems, on my record collection!) to underline the period ‘charm’ of East and West Berlin in the cold war.
Aside from the admirable Eddie Marsan (War Horse, Worlds End) as the Stazi defector, the rest of the cast consists of various large KGB men for Charlize to shoot, stab and otherwise break in various kinetic Bourne-style set-pieces, designed for maximum brutality and minimal realism; it’s the Cold War for the John Wick/Kingsman/Kickass generation.
Jonathan Sela’s camera flicks between washed out, run-down, Cold War cityscapes and letching over Charlize and Sofia, frequently echoing MTV videos, Duran Duran vinyl record sleeves and in spite of itself, Charlize’s wretched TV perfume adds. Flashy and pointless, the production betrays it’s graphic novel origins (Anthony Johnston’s The Coldest City) with characters that are supposed to be profound but realised as two-dimensional. Charlize’s hard-as-nails Veronica Broughton is so hard her compassionate moments are never quite believable – come back Furiosa. It’s no surprise that director John Leitch is also responsible for John Wick; good on action, thin on character; and writer Kurt Johnstad produced the 300‘s.
Unfolding via the well-trodden narrative device of Charlize’s end of mission debriefing, the twisty plot is revealed through a series of unreliable flashbacks involving a McGuffin list of agents, a suspected mole in MI6, a defector and various competing intelligence agencies whilst criss-crossing East and West Berlin; turning over a number of cars in the process. Like you do.
We all know Charlize is better than this, Macavoy (X-Men, Bright Young Things) used to be but isn’t any more, Goodman is there for the cheque, Sofia (The Mummy, Star Trek) is there to be spotted for better roles.
By the time we get to find out who’s the mole who’s the good guy and who are the bad guys, it’s gone on too long; Charlize has shot and stabbed just about everyone; and the stunt crew has more than earned their money. The shame of it is that everyone will blame Luc Besson for this and he had nothing to do with it – although it reminds me that Le Femme Nikita and Leon were much better at this sort of thing, while the Bourne‘s and the Bond‘s and even The Accountant achieve far greater depth than this. RC
Atomic Blonde (2017)
Director: Johnathan Leitch
Writer: Kurt Johnstad
Certification: 15/R
Genre: Action, adventure, thriller
Running time: 115 minutes
Cast: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Toby Jones, Sofia Boutella, John Goodman, Til Schweiger, Eddie Marsan
Pingback: Bright (2017) | Catling on Film
Pingback: Bridge of Spies (2016) | Catling on Film
Pingback: The Limehouse Golem (2016) | Catling on Film
Pingback: Red Sparrow (2018) | Catling on Film
Pingback: Peppermint (2018) | Catling on Film
Pingback: Anna (2019) | Catling on Film
Pingback: The Courier (2019) | Catling on Film
Pingback: Hobbs and Shaw (2019) | Catling on Film
Pingback: NTLive: Cyrano de Bergerac (2020) | Catling on Film
Pingback: The Old Guard (2020) | Catling on Film