The rhythm isn’t going to get you with The Rhythm Section
The Rhythm Section is a boring, aimless amalgamation of assassin tropes. Blake Lively and Jude Law struggle to inject life into it.
There’s something painfully dull and unmemorable about The Rhythm Section, so much so that finding an interesting lead-in to this review proved difficult. Assassin stories are a dime a dozen, though it’s admirable that director Reed Morano and screenwriter Mark Burnell, adapting his novel of the same name, want to try something different with their neophyte murderer played by Blake Lively. But what might work on the page fails to translate here as Morano’s quiet storytelling is at odds with a genre that is known for being loud and percussive. The lack of any narrative insight into its characters, needle drops that are there for the sake of them and a leading lady who doesn’t understand what to do leaves The Rhythm Section without any rhythm of its own.
Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) has become a shell of herself in the wake of her family’s death in a plane crash. Strung out on meth and working as a prostitute, Stephanie is pulled back into her family’s passing when a reporter lets her know the crash was really an act of terrorism and the bomber is walking the streets of London, free. But as Stephanie starts to dig for answers, bodies start piling up, leading her to a shadowy MI-6 agent named B (Jude Law) who decides to help teach Stephanie the ways of being an assassin.
Morano’s past work (Meadowland, I Think We’re Alone Now) is stepped in the melancholy and solitude of memory and human connection. That’s certainly an element of The Rhythm Section but where Morano could capture the depth of emotion in silence and artful weeping in other films, here it bogs down and deadens an already dull and shiftless wannabe-thriller. Stephanie’s past life, with Blake Lively looking like she’s reprised her Gossip Girl role, is shown in wordless moments of generic happiness: her and her family playing cards, her mother touching her face. These Punisher-esque flashbacks are all passed through with a Ludwig filter as if the audience needs more reason to know they were happy and perfect. But happy families don’t make for good drama and Burnell never gives us a reason to care for Stephanie other than her family died. Don’t worry about the 293 other souls who perished on the same plane, Stephanie Patrick is special!
And that’s ultimately the biggest McGuffin within The Rhythm Section. Despite the power audiences’ know Blake Lively has in other features, she ain’t reprising her A Simple Favor role. In fact, Stephanie Patrick spends a large portion of the movie having her butt handed to her. When she sets out to kill the bomb maker herself she ends up in the wilds of Scotland working with Law’s shadowy B. The two have a mentor/mentee relationship that flirts with the sexual though the movie appropriately eschews any romantic entanglements between the two. B has no faith in Stephanie’s ability to be a hitwoman and, really, he’s proven right. The portion where Law and Lively are together is where The Rhythm Section becomes, dare I say, lively. (I’ll see myself out.) The two have an easy chemistry and once they’re parted and Stephanie is sent out on her own, we’re left with little more than scenes of Lively pouting.
Make no mistake, this movie has so. much. pouting. If you excised the sequences of Lively walking, either away or towards something, and the numerous scenes of her presumed emotional ambiguity (generally relegated to scenes of her leaning her head against things or staring up at the ceiling), this movie would be about 40 minutes. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt’s camera practically seems to yawn in the lengthy tracking shots or single moments. When there is sorely-needed action the camera transitions to headache-inducing mobile camerawork reminiscent of the post-9/11 era. Interestingly, that mentality is at the heart of The Rhythm Section and immediately gives the feature a dated quality despite having events centered between the present-day and 2017 when the crash takes place. But the various locales Stephanie goes to, from London to Tangiers, look primitive, drab, as if this is 1997 or as far as 2008.
Once Lively enters assassin mode the film picks up, more so in that it actual momentum in its action as opposed to its story. The deeper complexities of how Stephanie feels about what she’s doing are never explored, short of seeing her cry every now and then. Adding insult to injury, the film adds key plot contrivances to give Stephanie a soul, as if it acknowledges her character has zero personality. When she meets up with a contact named Serra (played by Sterling K. Brown) the script tries to give some sauciness but it’s all incredibly chaste and inserted via flash-cuts, almost as if it’s not even real. (The editing here is flat-out terrible and almost implies that this narrative was found in the editing room.) Like Lively, Brown is completely wasted, reliant on his offstage persona as a nice guy to fill in for any backstory his character could possess.
Next. Dolittle certainly does nothing as one of 2020’s worst. dark
The Rhythm Section is a disappointment on every front. It’s admirable that Morano wanted to branch out but she should have picked a better screenwriter. The movie wanders in search of something to pep it up, from weak needle drops to hyper-mobile action.
It’ll play great as background noise on TNT in a few years.