Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 49 minutes
Director: Reed Morano
Quick Impressions:
As we watched the first act of The Rhythm Section, I couldn’t resist leaning over and whispering to my husband, “I think the real star of this movie is Blake Lively’s hat.”
I’m not kidding, I love that hat. It’s this eye-catching, blue, knitted beanie that she wears everywhere until she learns to kill. Actually I’d describe the beanie’s color as either a super-saturated robin’s egg or a washed out turquoise. If there is better head gear to make a trek across the brushy, burnt sienna landscape of rural Scotland pop, our species is not ready for it yet.
So that hat definitely caught my eye. What caught my ear was the amazing song that played during the end credits, the same song that played over the trailer. It’s so catchy and cool that it tricks you into feeling like you’ve just watched a much better movie.
“Yes, this movie is flawed,” I thought, “but at least it will launch this amazing new song. I don’t know much about music, but this new song is destined to be popular.”
Yeah, I really don’t know much about music. As it turns out, that song (“In the Pines”) has been around since the Civil War. But at least this version of it by Sleigh Bells is new. It’s a very cool song. I could easily imagine a future in which I play that song in my car and drive around in a Blake Lively blue hat pretending I’m a spy.
The Good:
Blake Lively gives a good performance in this movie, a film which ultimately lets her down (and broke her hand), but does provide a showcase for her talent. Not so long ago, I was unimpressed by Blake Lively. But that’s because I never watched Gossip Girl and mainly knew her from Green Lantern. Then I saw The Shallows and A Simple Favor and revised my incorrect estimation of her talent and appeal as a leading lady. As I watched an early(ish) scene of this film, I couldn’t help imagining some casting director saying, “Wait a minute. Blake Lively can play more than a socialite. She’s also great at playing a heroin addict drowning in a lake! We need her for this part!”
I’m sure that’s not how Lively was cast, but she is building a nice resume of lady-in-the-water movies.
Here she plays a young British woman named Stephanie Patrick who loses her entire family (i.e. her siblings and parents) in a plane crash, and in her grief (and guilt) becomes a drug addict and prostitute.
“Don’t give away the whole thing,” cautioned my daughter who had asked about the plot.
“No, that’s just the first five minutes,” I assured her.
She then proceeded to tell me that I should have watched the movie she saw with her grandparents (while we were out) on Amazon Prime, Troop Zero. (“I know you’d love it! Allison Janney is in it!”) And she’s right. I probably should have stayed home and watched that.
But The Rhythm Section does have its strengths. As I said, Lively is excellent in her role, totally committed to the character with a reasonably convincing British accent and an eye-catching array of spy hair once she ditches the blue hat.
She’s not actually a spy. She’s working with one (sort of) and posing as hired killed (for the devious purpose of killing for hire) because after learning the plane crash was caused by a bomb, she wants revenge on the terrorists involved. Every last one!
The plot is pretty simple, and basically there are only a handful of characters (and just three big stars), so the story is a little easy to predict…also a little thin…also muddled. Okay the story is terrible. It feels contrived, too simple and yet simultaneously too confusing. For me, it felt like the pilot of a TV show, and I wish it had been because I wanted to watch the rest of the series and get some of my lingering questions answered. But the movie was over. Writing isn’t everything, though. All of the performances are good. The action scenes are visceral, intense, and immersive. And the color scheme is beyond compare.
Joining Lively are co-stars Jude Law, (who, like that hat, is also eye-catching in rustic settings) and Sterling K. Brown (who is quite appealing in this role. His acting style sometimes doesn’t work for me, but he’s a such a good fit for this part that I’d love to see him in another spy thriller in the future).
Best Action Sequence:
The action in this film is good. Apparently, Blake Lively did her own stunts and shattered her hand by accidentally punching Jude Law in the elbow. The injury required two surgeries, delayed filming, and gave her a dazzling anecdote to tell Jimmy Fallon on
The Tonight Show. It also resulted in the most riveting action scene in the film, not the fight between Lively and Law in which the injury was actually sustained, but the scene the filmmakers embroidered later to explain the injury of the character’s hand. I absolutely love the moment when Lively’s character hurts her hand during a fight with a man on breathing treatments. This particular fight may be the best scene in the movie. The violence is so visceral, and then the way she manages to win is…odd. Her escape is fantastic, too, such a clumsy car chase. It reminds me of the way I (with my sub-par skill level) play video games.
Best Scene Visually:
Early on, Blake Lively walks into a lake. The movie really takes its time here, and so the (shaky) image is burnt into my mind.
Another image I can’t shake? “Jude Law Looks Hot at a Table.” That’s what I jokingly labelled the scene in my inner monologue the moment I saw it. He’s just sitting at a table, staring handsomely to the side, oddly coordinating with the colors in the room. This image looked so good.
Honestly, I am leaning toward hating the style of cinematography used in this film. Shaky cam is fine in small doses, but this cam is ultra shaky all the time. I do, however, love the movie’s color scheme, its eye for color, use of color. Production stills from this must be amazing. I wish the camera would occasionally hold still to let us linger over the striking images. The movie looks like an artist set up the perfect photograph by coordinating colors and making excellent use of light, and then recorded the whole thing by strapping a go-pro on an active toddler.
Best Scene:
There’s a moment I love when Lively’s character gets some help from another woman. They have another scene together later. I wanted to see more of this.
Most Disappointing Scene:
I was quite curious about what went on in that penthouse and what kind of disaster would ensue. That whole episode was so anticlimactic. Its aftermath also planted suspicion in my mind, and I wish the movie would have given us more information instead of simply ending.
The Negatives:
The cinematography in this film is so bad that I assumed one of two things had to be true. 1) Director Reed Morano had a vision, but the cinematographer lacked the skill (or budget) to carry it out. 2) Director Reed Morano was so inexperienced with cinematography that she did not give much thought to this aspect of the film.
Much to my surprise, after watching the film I discovered that Reed Morano is herself an accomplished cinematographer (with fifty credits on IMDB!). In fact, she was the director of photography on The Skeleton Twins, a film I really liked, and Frozen River, which looked great. (That scene with the “suspicious package” left on the ice is so memorable.) Not only that, but The Rhythm Section‘s cinematographer Sean Bobbitt was the director of photography for basically all of Steve McQueen’s big movies (12 Years a Slave, Hunger, Shame, Widows) as well as The Place Beyond the Pines and Old Boy and Byzantium.
So now I am stunned.
“Why?” I want to ask. “You did this on purpose?” With that level of professional experience, that’s the only possible conclusion, I’m afraid. “Why?”
The camera is constantly in motion. It’s not just shaky cam. It looks like they obtained the footage by handing out cameras to the Olympic gymnastics team. (I’m pretty sure it’s a part of training. “You have to keep your camera on a moving Blake Lively while performing a perfect vault and sticking the landing. To help you out, we’ve given her a bright blue hat.”)
The camera work in this movie makes Speed 2 look like it was shot on a fixed tripod. (Of course, maybe it was. I don’t know if they always achieve the handheld look by intuitive methods. I don’t make movies.)
Now I will grant that sometimes this works. At the beginning, the protagonist is a heroin addict. (I think it’s heroin.) And she’s taking in a lot of surprising, trauma-triggering information. So the motion sickness inducing visuals do help us to understand her reeling interior state. And camera work like this does make the action scenes immersive and exciting. (They really hit you in the old rhythm section, you know.) This is not a cerebral film. It’s driven forward by high emotion and tense muscles. I get that.
But so often, the cinematography seems…bad?…to me. It’s distracting. You want to see normally, to get a read of what’s going on, but you can’t. The fact that this is done deliberately baffles me. I assume they were going for something amazing, (maybe trying to show us that Stephanie never has a clear read of any situation), but it just didn’t quite work.
The other kind of shocking thing is that this movie is based on a successful novel (adapted by the author himself, Mark Burnell), because both my husband and I found the story conspicuously lacking. Imagine settling down to watch a mystery starring three big name actors. The detective (star one) walks into a house where he finds the butler (star two) standing next to a corpse (star three). That’s how I felt about The Rhythm Section. It presents so few possibilities that the gears in my head started spinning, trying to use the limited options available to create some clever twist. (The detective did it! The detective is dead! He’s in purgatory! The detective and the “corpse” are conspiring to drive the butler mad! How can we be sure this is the detective?) Sadly the potential twists I dreamed up were much more clever (and satisfying) (to me) than what The Rhythm Section gives us.
What really bothers me about the story is that Stephanie jumps to so many conclusions and answers her own questions so much of the time, with basically no unequivocal confirmation or verifiable proof about so many things! How is she sure that she’s right? Granted the villain makes sort of a Death Eatery slip probably designed to give the audience a big clue. But I don’t know. Except for Stephanie, everybody in this movie is kind of a villain (and she’s a repeat murderer!). How does she know she is finished (or is she planning to continue in another movie)? How does she trust anyone?
My husband had another question. Why is Stephanie involved in at all? He wanted to know why the person who reached out to her in the first place thought that looping her in was necessary or practical. I have some guesses, but I’m not entirely sure. I’m more concerned with the motivations and goals of the person she gets in touch with after that. I find the whole thing strange and unsatisfying. I don’t feel good about any of her triumphs because she’s constantly being manipulated.
Actually, it’s that second person I really don’t trust. I know I’m a woman and all, and I am glad to see a female led film of this kind, but I actually think another character is more interesting than Lively’s. The issue here is not that there isn’t a coherent story. It’s that the movie is presented in a way that obscures much of that story. Most of the best parts of that story are not about Stephanie and have little to do with her, but she is the one who is always on screen. I wish the story had been presented differently. Blake Lively could still be the lead, but there’s so much story that we must put together for ourselves. Why not cast two other key female characters and flesh out the scenario? (Like I said, Stephanie can still be our way in, but maybe add some flashbacks or begin the film in a different way.) I find our protagonist’s motivations muddled. Stephanie wants closure, I guess, but does she really have it? I’m less sure than she is.
I have no doubts Burnell’s book is good, but it has not transitioned to the screen well. I heard Blake Lively mention (James Bond) producer Barbara Broccoli in an interview, and I assume the goal here was to launch a series of female led action films. I doubt that will happen, but I would watch others. I have so many unanswered questions.
Overall:
The Rhythm Section has an eye-catching color scheme (a really cute hat!), and several moments of intense, breathtaking action. The cast is good, particularly Blake Lively in the lead role, but the story doesn’t translate well to the screen, and the cinematographer makes bold, questionable (and, unfortunately, dizzying) choices. I can’t honestly call the movie satisfying, but it does, at least, explain the meaning of its metaphorical title in a pointed way that you can’t possibly miss. I hate it when movies with obscure titles keep us guessing!
