Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review | Tagged: Atomic Blonde, film, HRL, Review

'Atomic Blonde' Review: All Spectacle With A Predictable Plot

Atomic Blonde is all style and very little in the way of substance to make up for a rather lackluster storyline.

Director: David Leitch
Summary: An undercover MI6 agent is sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a missing list of double agents.

There has been some serious hype for Atomic Blonde, as the marketing has really hyped the fight scenes and how much of her own stunt work star Charlize Theron did. The idea that a hard R-rated action movie can still make money is a relatively new thing brought on by the success of the John Wick movies.

The fingerprints of that series are all over Atomic Blonde in a very good way. The action scenes are brutal and hard to watch. We see Lorraine (Theron) get punched, slammed into walls, thrown to the ground, and she carries every bruise. It's something we don't get to see in movies often: a woman bruised and bloody without her being a victim. It's almost jarring at first.

The structure of the movie is a little odd in that we're watching Lorraine deliver her report on the mission, so we know she survives to the end. It's a tactic that more or less works, but it means the movie has to work twice as hard to keep us engaged with the supporting players, since their fates are the ones we don't know.

David Percival (James McAvoy) is the wild card from the get go and it becomes very obvious that he's not entirely "there" anymore. Where they go with him is — to go without spoiling — predictable, until it suddenly isn't. Fellow agent from France Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella) is our "Bond girl" role and her relationship with Lorraine is believable and almost sweet. This is all surrounded by a neon color scheme, fantastic clothes, and a soundtrack that perfectly captures the late 1980s.

All of the pieces are here for a great movie, but there is a huge stumble in the form of the story. One of the things that made John Wick such a hit was the world that was created within the action scenes. There was an entire culture of assassins living in plain sight and it was what elevated the movie from "good" to "great". Atomic Blonde, however, has a very generic Cold War spy plot that checks off all of the cliches one by one without an original thought in its head. Aside from making the lead character a woman and giving her a girlfriend, these are all things we've seen before. You'll know most of the twists halfway through the movie, which isn't what you want from a spy thriller.

Atomic Blonde might not have the most original story but the fight scenes and overall aesthetic of the movie are good enough to overlook that. It's a production that knows exactly what it wants to accomplish and what it wants to be. It's just a shame that there weren't a few more original ideas to go with all of those awesome fight choreography and fantastic cinematography.

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