The Rhythm Section Review: It Is  A Besura but Strong Thriller!

The Rhythm Section

Starring Blake Lively as Stephanie Patrick,Jude Law as Iain Boyd, Sterling K. Brown as Marc Serra

Directed by Reed Morano

Rating:  **(2 stars)

It isn’t  right to bring up  an actor’s family background while assessing his or her work. But  it’s relevant here to  point out that Blake Lively’s film is  anything but  lively.As  opposed to her husband Ryan Reynolds who likes to be in  happy film, Mrs Lively  likes her cinema  shaken and  stirred.

She had sharks chasing her  in The Shallows.  She  has  an assortments of agents,  counter-agents,  terrorists and counter-terrorists  pursuing her in this  not-bad-but-not-good-enough thriller with a  crackerjack central performance by  Ms Lively as a  depressed  wretchedly  disoriented  Londoner  who  loses  her entire family to an airborne bombing. Rather than  seek  professional help  she sets out to find the  terrorists behind the  bombing. Full marks for  gumption and  stupidity.

If you can swallow the heroine’s  outrageous  heroics, then  move ahead. Otherwise  chuck it right here.Unlike the other chic stylish  female  spies  like Jennifer Lawrence  in Red Sparrow and Charlize Theron  in Atomic Blonde, Blake Lively doesn’t play the high-stakes  hijinks  for glamour. She is raw  hurting wounded and  often ugly and desperate, so much so that at the  very beginning  of  the  film she misses  the chance to shoot down  the terrorist she’s looking for.

From this point of  the action version of coitus interruptus,  its pretty much downhill all the way, with Jude Law terribly miscast as some of kind of  an agent  who  double crosses so  many  people that I am  sure he himself forgets  which side he is  on.

Ditto  the  film.  It  moves in  numbingly mysterious ways  with the absurdities piling up to  a point where  we just can’t seem to care about  Stephanie’s revenge.  The plot moves from London to Madrid  to  New York but  the  narrative remain  stubbornly static. The  wheels-within-wheels  creak and  groan  desperately in  need of  oiling.  But the  director  opts for an extra-dry tone , rendering the film, rhythm less and eventually,  pointless.By the  time we reach  the mandatory twist at the end  we are so  distanced  from Stephanie’s pain as to find it redundant.

Blake Lively’s  visceral  performance helps us  stay  watchful  till the end. Take her  out  and  we are  left with a spy thriller stripped  off thrills by an over-written script .