The Rhythm Section

In 2018, the film Red Spar­row attempt­ed to rein­tro­duce Jen­nifer Lawrence to the pub­lic as a sexy, sleek, seri­ous super­spy with unmatched com­bat skills and a dark back­sto­ry to match. She and her star vehi­cle failed in this endeav­our, but Reed Mora­no believes that with some tin­ker­ing here and there, she may be able to suc­ceed in doing the same thing for Blake Live­ly with The Rhythm Section.

Lively’s lat­est launch­pad comes to us from EON Pro­duc­tions, one of only three non-James Bond releas­es front­ed by the com­pa­ny in its near 60-year his­to­ry. While they’re cer­tain­ly angling to cor­ner the same mar­ket, aveng­ing angel Stephanie Patrick cuts a decid­ed­ly rougher pro­file than 007.

The script joins her in dire straits, blow­ing all of the mon­ey earned from sex work in dingy hotel rooms on a drug depen­den­cy rep­re­sent­ed via over-the-top top­sy-turvi­ness. How did she go from top of her class at Oxford to a ​“cliché,” as her sen­sei Iain (Jude Law) phras­es what dou­bles as a metacin­e­mat­ic self-own? Every­thing changed when her fam­i­ly died in a plane crash that, if some coun­tert­er­ror­ism intel is to be trust­ed, may not have been an accident.

And so our gal is thrust onto the warpath, chewed up and spat out and reborn as a sin­gle-mind­ed ram­pag­ing force of ret­ri­bu­tion. It all sounds like fool­proof place-set­ting, and yet in prac­tice Morano’s lack of facil­i­ty as a sto­ry­teller leaves the hand­ful of bravu­ra action set-pieces with noth­ing to con­nect them.

Stephanie can sharp­shoot, take a punch and dish out gen­er­al pun­ish­ment with the best of them. But with­out any tan­gi­ble sense of who she is, her soul-deep mis­sion to exact revenge comes off as shal­low and unim­por­tant, a feel­ing only rein­forced by a fiz­zling end­ing. As the con­clud­ing scenes would have it, this jour­ney has been all about Stephanie remem­ber­ing who she is, but from where the audi­ence sits, she’s not much of anyone.

Mora­no does what she can to draw the pain out of the fight scenes that become the de fac­to main attrac­tion, crank­ing up the foley effects on each slam to con­vey max­i­mum impact. A close-up lingers on Stephanie’s gashed hand after she gets on the wrong side of a bro­ken win­dow, and the ban­dage doesn’t mag­ic itself away by the next scene.

Live­ly com­mu­ni­cates this frailty through her per­for­mance as well, her entire body wracked with con­vul­sive shiv­ers as she wades into a sym­bol­ic ice-cold lake dur­ing her train­ing. That moment in par­tic­u­lar illus­trates that while the phys­i­cal com­po­nent has been inte­grat­ed ably – the film’s nev­er bet­ter than dur­ing a one-take car chase aping the sim­i­lar sequence from Chil­dren of Men – Stephanie’s bland, indis­tinct rise can’t meet it halfway.

She works her way up the vague­ly Mid­dle East­ern cell respon­si­ble for the plane hijack­ing, each vil­lain less of a per­son than the next. The film takes noth­ing more than a per­func­to­ry inter­est in whether Marc (Ster­ling K Brown) will be Stephanie’s ally, lover, or some­thing more. When she final­ly dis­patch­es the final boss ter­ror­ist, it lands with the impact of any oth­er plot point. She’s a man­nequin going through the motions assigned to her, and while Live­ly may wear the arche­type more com­fort­ably than the expen­sive lin­gerie neces­si­tat­ed by her new pro­fes­sion, she lacks a state­ment piece.

There’s noth­ing to set her apart from the oth­er morose-faced femme fatales doing the old seduce-and-destroy. The old joke about James Bond was that such a mem­o­rable, instant­ly icon­ic char­ac­ter could nev­er pull off the incog­ni­to part of going under­cov­er; Stephanie won’t have a sim­i­lar problem.