How much can you recommend a movie on the basis of a single scene? At the start of the third act, Atomic Blonde presents a truly masterful action setpiece, a brutal stairway fight between super-spy Charlize Theron and a pack of communist goons, shot in a brutal and clear long take. The scene must last for about ten minutes, and it alone redeems Atomic Blonde, which is otherwise a bit of a mess. The Berlin Wall backdrop and spray-paint punk aesthetic lend themselves to an anarchist or revolutionary spirit that the main plot and action never live up to. The plot is absolute cold-war spy nonsense, a series of thing that happen to illogical ends. This would be fine if it had some colorful characters, but even though Theron gives an amazing physical performance and James McAvoy gets some good lines in the early going, none of the supporting cast really pops at all. Even the action scenes are fairly middling, outside of the aforementioned stairway brawl. They are all fluid and well choreographed, but rarely exciting in the same pulse-pounding way that John Wick, director David Leitch’s previous, was. It also relies annoyingly heavily on ’80s pop cuts to score the film, but the intended tonal whiplash in certain scenes (such as 99 Red Balloons over a skateboard beatdown) isn’t so much jarringly misanthropic as juvenile, and the choices in the action scenes never gel as well as they do in something like Guardians of the Galaxy. But there is that central scene, ten minutes of pure violent ecstasy. It’s almost worth a rental for that alone.
C-
Atomic Blonde (2017)
Directed by David Leitch
Starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Sofia Boutella, and John Goodman
Rotten Tomatoes (74%)
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