Anna Daniels
Unfortunately, the vast majority of critics agree that The Rhythm Section is way out of sync. Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter failed to appreciate the film’s dramatic bent, writing, “[Lively] wears so many headpieces that the proceedings begin to resemble a Carol Burnett Show sketch,” and many other critics were equally unkind.
Michael Philips of The Chicago Tribune got right to the point in his headline, saying the film features “Blake Lively, changing wigs and exacting vengeance, in a movie not so lively” (ouch), and though he wished the film had produced better returns, his eventual prognosis was just as brutal: “I wish Burnell’s screen adaptation had found some way around Jude Law’s steely operative ‘molding’ the grieving killing machine into his kind of woman, but the plot, as compressed here, offers no way around it,” he wrote. “The movie is made well, if you’re buying what it’s selling, and if you don’t consider a story or a script as crucial to the quality of a thriller.”
Meanwhile, The A.V. Club‘s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky went after the work of veteran cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave), writing, “What is actually in [the film] appears to have been a tertiary matter. The Rhythm Section is filled with conversations covered from random camera angles; the close-ups probably looked cool through the viewfinder, but they have a discombobulating effect when cut together. It’s enough to turn basic expository scenes into spot-the-difference games of mismatched eye lines.”
William Bibbiani of The Wrap, whose headline called the film “decidedly off-tempo,” got hilariously to the point early in his review: “It hardly feels like a story. It’s as though a vague structure somehow got a mind of its own and wandered into cinemas without supervision.”
Written by: Looper
