"THE RHYTHM SECTION" (2020)

The Rhythm Section

Directed by Reed Morano

Based onthe novel by Mark Burnell; Screenplay by MarkBurnell

Starring Blake Lively, Jude Law & Sterling K. Brown

Running time: 1 hour and 49 minutes

MPAA rating: R for violence, sexual content, language throughout and drug use

by Hunter Bush

The Rhythm Section hit a lot of sour notes for me. I promise to keep the Gene Shalit-style puns to a minimum, but I had to do at least that one. Honestly though, not much about this flick kept me interested at all. It's riddled with clichés, some of the worst needle drop music choices and bafflingly stifled action scenarios.

Let's take it from the top (there should be a Gene Shalit emoji I could drop in after every one of these). The title is "The Rhythm Section", which is wildly unrelated to the overall revenge-by-way-of-spy-craft genre of the film, so much so that it's almost intriguing. The film opens with Stephanie (Blake Lively) in an exotic locale (Tangiers if I recall correctly) about to assassinate someone and the sound drops out until all we can hear is her breathing and heartbeat and a voice (Jude Law) explaining "Your heart is the drums. Your breathing is the bass. This is the rhythm section." and it's almost really captivating. What a unique way to approach the kind of centering of oneself you must need to take someone's life.

Unfortunately it's not anchored to anything. Neither Lively's nor Law's characters have any attachment to music that would make this teaching metaphor really resonate with either of them. He might as well have told her "Your heart is Bert. Your breathing is Ernie. And when they work together you can sing the Rubber Duckie song, by which of course I mean you can take a human life." It's just as apt a metaphor to these characters as a rhythm section is.

So back in Tangiers (I believe) Lively is about to take some unsuspecting target's life and ...we cut to eight months earlier. This is usually not a good sign. The action scene cold open that gets interrupted in order to actually start the movie is almost always an indicator that the filmmakers don't think their first act is strong enough to keep an audience's attention. Knowing that in eight months something really gripping will happen is supposed to convince the audience to "endure" the "boring stuff" like plot, backstory and character motivation.

To be totally honest, those "boring things" in The Rhythm Section are reasonably compelling. Three years previous (yep, we jumped back 8 months and the inciting incident is still further back) Lively's Stephanie lost her entire family in a plane crash, the trauma leading her to three years of hard drugs and prostitution but when a reporter comes to interview her, she learns that the plane crash was caused by a terrorist bombing and gets motivated to become a one-woman strike force of revenge. Is that bonkers? For sure, but it's also a perfectly fun set-up for a genre movie.

After Stephanie makes the trek to some lonely loch or another to meet up with the ex-MI6 master spy known only as B. (Jude Law), we're off to the races. After B. forces her to detox and trains her, she's off to Tangiers. Turns out the target from the cold open wasn't even the bomb-maker she wants to kill, just a middleman between the bomber-maker and someone known as U17 (an MI6 designation denoting a person whom they know exists but have absolutely no intel on) who has been the financier behind the airplane bombing as well as a host of others. And after Tangiers, she makes contact with an intelligence broker (the people who know all the underworld dealings and can theoretically point her toward her main targets) who makes her take a side-job contract to assassinate some other guy (but don't worry, because I'm pretty sure he's also somehow connected) and on and on.

Here's the thing: Stephanie kind of sucks as spy craft. She's decent at the international intrigue parts, and if I'm being honest she's dynamite at the wigs, but when it comes to fighting and killing, she's terrible. She fails to directly, actively kill any of her targets - in one instance simply stopping them from taking their medicine and in two other instances she just leaves and other people kill them. In the traditionally white and male genres of revenge and espionage thrillers, Stephanie is co-opting the white male-est tradition of them all: failing upwards. While that's fun conceptually it amounts to a series of anti-climaxes in the movie.

So why does The Rhythm Section routinely pulls its punches? Of course I don't know but I have some guesses. Firstly, the fact that the film is produced by Barbara Broccoli may have something to do with it. I base this assumption entirely on the soundtrack. Despite taking place in a modern setting, features exclusively pop songs from the 1960's (they're also wildly discordant with the scenes and tone - tense scene during a peace rally in Morocco? How about Elvis Presley's It's Now or Never ?) and when I think spy shit in the 1960's I think of James Bond. The Broccoli family have produced all of the James Bond films, so I can see how having Barbara produce your film could influence you to lean harder into everything that's James Bond-esque about it, whether that's her desire or not. Either way it's a mistake. Nothing can be Bond though many have tried, and in fact the more recent successful spy genre franchises (your assorted Bourne and Kingsman) have mostly tried their best to distinguish themselves from Bond. Instead of attempting to make Stephanie Patrick a Bond-like character through audience association osmosis, they should be focusing on what might distinguish her from Bond. Her morality and empathy and the pathos of her origins.

Of course, it could also be the result of that old standard: studio interference. The Rhythm Section is a wildly inconsistent film. Some scenes are edited so poorly I would almost believe this was a rough cut while others are done quite well; at some times much effort is put into explaining characters actions or motivations and at others it's not. This all reeks of a post-completion second edit, as does the cold open. What sense does it really make to be building up to Stephanie's first anticlimactic kill unless it's that test audiences found the first act too slow? And as long as I've mentioned it, having Stephanie repeatedly indirectly kill each of her targets until U17 (the person ultimately responsible for her family's death, remember) seems like a smart decision - emphasizing that she wasn't made for this life, that this life is something that happened to her and something she may not truly be capable of. That's juicy character material! Except she straight-up shoots a couple of nameless, faceless bodyguards in Morocco (or wherever) but I guess they don't matter to this overarching dramatic narrative because they were just goons?

It's sloppy storytelling, which brings me to my final guess: it's an adaptation. The Rhythm Section is based on a book (screenwriter Mark Burnell is adapting his novel of the same name) and maybe everything just works better on the page than it does onscreen? Because onscreen it plays as a series of rote clichés without innovation or insight.

Despite this, there are some things I enjoyed about The Rhythm Section. The locations and costuming were excellent. The apartment in Tangiers is very much an apartment I'd love to have, right down the huge iguana wandering around unsupervised. Or maybe it was a kimodo dragon? I mentioned above that Blake Lively kills it with her wig game and that wasn't facetious! We all know the most fun part of being an international spy is the wigs! (How come the dudes never have to wear wigs? Bond is almost always just walking around looking like himself - with that one extremely problematic exception from Your Only Live Twice - let the dudes play dress-up! Costumes are fun!).

There's also the chemistry between Lively and Law, which is genuinely magnetic. Weirdly B.'s seeming indifference toward Stephanie was fascinating since it was clearly a ruse and their nastiness towards each other was more exciting than the attempted sexual tension between Lively and Sterling K. Brown's information broker character. Finally the action scenes were extremely well handled. A really tense, realistically messy training fistfight between Lively and Law (all shot in one take from a static camera I believe) and a car chase in Tangiers both jump to mind, though the car chase felt a little more gimmicky.

I can't honestly recommend The Rhythm Section to anyone, but should they make more, I hope they lean further into Stephanie's character and give Blake Lively more opportunity to create someone unique.