In the new thriller “The Rhythm Section,” Blake Lively and Sterling K. Brown share a scene in which Lively, as bullet-for-hire and perpetual wig-changer Stephanie Patrick, discusses possible employment opportunities with Brown, who plays a shadowy fixer with international connections. Our heroine’s ultimate target: a radical Islamic terrorist who may be responsible for killing her entire family aboard a jet airline attack, no survivors.
In all their scenes, Lively and Brown talk like they’re in a spy movie. You know the sound. Comically low tones, so questions sound like statements. Statements that sound like two people trying to fool the polygraph. It’s a battle of the deadpan mutterers, and the actors are highly trained in the art of portraying chameleons with plenty to hide.
“The Rhythm Section” doesn’t have much to say; it’s more about non-verbal suffering and atmosphere, and it certainly has a distinctive, ashen-toned look to show for itself. The material, equals parts Mata Hari and Jason Bourne, is another story. You could call it tried and true, or you could call it tired and false.
We’ve admired righteous super-assassins with surreally low blood pressure for a long time now. Think of it: The first Bourne film came out 18 years ago, just as America fully entered its raging, paranoid phase, and Robert Ludlam wrote his first Bourne novel a generation before that. While there have been several international female-driven film projects along these lines (“La Femme Nikita,” et al.), “The Rhythm Section” is a defiantly old-school attempt to get something new going.
Backed by the producers of the James Bond franchise, the project enjoys the advantage of a built-in fan base, although that may be the only thing about director Reed Morano‘s film that speaks to straight-up enjoyment. Lively’s character, a Londoner, falls into a tailspin of grief, drugs and prostitution following the midair tragedy over the Atlantic. Trained as a cinematographer, Morano leans into the protagonist’s suffering in a way that few male directors would’ve favored.
Morano shot part of the gorgeous Beyonce “Lemonade” project, as well as many other films, including the stark, atmospheric “Frozen River.” Here she works with “Widows” and “12 Years a Slave” cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, one of the best around, to create a palette suited to a fantasy about a woman descending halfway into hell, and assassinating her way out of it. The look is miserably dank one minute and blindingly sun-baked the next (the film was shot primarily in Ireland and Spain), and you notice it. Published in 2000, Mark Burnell’s debut novel — the first of four Stephanie Patrick adventures — was engineered for the movies, built to attract a bankable actress in a globe-trotting series of assignments while changing identities, hairstyles and personae at will.
Lively proved with “The Shallows” that she could run a profitable genre exercise with easy authority. She’s fierce and often affecting here. 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. The one-man commando training camp is located in a remote part of Scotland. Throughout “The Rhythm Section” Law leaps into frame to choke, punch or wallop Lively as a series of jolly tests, often scored (egregiously) to ironic, upbeat pop tunes. At moments such as these the movie feels like the sternest possible reenactment of the old Inspector Clouseau/Cato routine from a “Pink Panther” comedy.
The title refers to what a character from Burnell’s novel (not in the movie) tells Stephanie: “Your heart is the drums, your breathing is the bass … Keep the rhythm section tight and the rest of the song plays itself.” Yes, and your spleen is the brass and your kidneys are the reeds and that title is just a tarted-up conceit. Delays in the film’s production resulted from an on-set injury sustained by Lively, followed by the star’s pregnancy and the ultimate birth of Lively’s third child. The movie is made well, if you’re buying what it’s selling, and if you don’t consider a story or a script crucial to the quality of a thriller.
“The Rhythm Section” — 2 stars
MPAA rating: R (for violence, sexual content, language throughout, and some drug use)
Running time: 1:49
Opens: Thursday evening
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
