The Rhythm Section

The Rhythm Section

Starring Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Raza Jaffrey

Directed by Reed Morano

In the "American Dad" episode "The 42-Year-Old Virgin," it's revealed that Stan Smith - then known as the CIA's most lethal killer - never really killed anyone before, but each perpetrator he encountered ended up dead due to other means other than Smith's hand, showing his ineptitude with killing.  I mention this because that was what was running through my mind while watching "The Rhythm Section" - a by-the-books average-woman-turned-assassin that's highly predictable, bland, stale, and without any charm or charisma.  Most importantly, the assassin is totally incompetent and would've easily been disposed of in her first mission, but of course that would've meant the film would've ended in about an hour so they had to showcase her bumbling through hit after hit.

It's been three years since Stephanie Patrick's (Blake Lively) entire family died in a plane crash, and she's spent those years addicted to drugs and serving as a prostitute in London, completely devoid of any human emotion.  She's found by investigative journalist Keith Proctor (Raza Jaffrey) who tells her that the plane crash was no accident, and was actually a terrorist attack.  At first she's wary of the information, but after she discovers the truth for herself, sets out to kill the men associated with the deaths of her family.  She's taken in by former MI6 agent Iain Boyd (Jude Law) and is trained to be an assassin, and sent out to dispatch those who were the cause of the crash.  He leads her to information broker Marc Serra (Sterling K. Brown) who helps Stephanie find everyone behind the scenes who were involved with the bombing, and Stephanie finds herself more and more over her head while she also learns more on the field to extract her revenge.

Unlike films like "La Femme Nikita," "Red Sparrow," and "Columbiana," "The Rhythm Section" doesn't feature a cold, calculated, intelligent assassin but rather one that goes through an accelerated process who enters the fray totally green and if it was real life would've been easily dispatched by the first man she tries to kill.  While sometimes I can appreciate a truly "blue" assassin who grows into her own, "The Rhythm Section" makes her entire operation totally nonsensical and baffling, and you mildly feel bad for the bad guys for being (often unintentionally) taken out by such a noobie.

Blake Lively is really the sole driving force for what makes this film absolutely terrible, as she totally throws herself in each moment no matter how strenuous or active the situation calls for.  She sheds her natural beauty and becomes a dirty, down-and-out woman who showcases true emotion at the loss of her family and the destructive path she took after their deaths, and something that should've been explored more to give her a fuller backstory instead of just snippets of her being around her family with no dialogue.  We know nothing about Stephanie's past, and the Stephanie of now is numb, unemotional, and rather robotic in all her motives, and she never changes throughout the film.  Likewise the other major stars - Jude Law and Sterling K. Brown - are as unemotional as she is, especially Law's character who apparently spent months training her but in the end remains as cold to her as when they first met.

The action of the film is very few and far between for a movie like this, and again it pretty much involves Stephanie bumbling her way through a kill.  There's two specific scenes though that really stand out in a good way - one involves Stephanie fighting with Boyd in his kitchen in one take, in a confined space that's claustrophobic and incredibly well performed.  The other involves a car chase Stephanie embarks on where we see the entire thing happening from the passenger seat of her car, and we feel like we're there with her as she struggles to weave and bob the car through different obstacles and other cars shooting at her, and as I was watching it I couldn't think of another film where I saw this happen from the point of view of inside the car as a passenger, so that was a small plus.

When it comes to the story, it's as bland and uninspired as they come, like someone had to write a story for their creative writing class but forgot about it until twenty minutes before it was due and threw together every stereotypical trope of assassin films together for this composite mess - except that it's actually based off a novel by Mark Burnell (who was also the screenwriter for the film) in the late 90s.  Watching this doesn't make me want to read the novel anytime soon.

While Blake Lively works with what she has, "The Rhythm Section" has absolutely no rhythm when it comes to delivering a thoughtful, exciting assassin story, but rather relies on old tropes and giving us the most inept assassin of all time bumbling her way through hit after hit.

The Score: D+