The Rhythm Section (Review)

There’s a serious lack of action movies featuring truly badass women, which is why I had high hopes for The Rhythm Section. The fact that there was also a woman directing it, Reed Morano, was also enticing since I find that women tend to do a better job with movies featuring strong women in them (see Wonder Woman, Sero Dark Thirty, Winter’s Bone, etc). While The Rhythm Section certainly does have a tough as nails heroine, it remains so focused on her that everything else falls to the wayside. The end result is a film that is so obsessed with Blake Lively’s Stephanie Patrick, that it doesn’t care about anything else, like plot, story arcs, or pacing.

Reminiscent of 2017’s American Assassin, The Rhythm Section tells the story of a woman who lost her family in a terror attack that was reported as a plane crash. Learning the truth three years later, drug addict and prostitute, Stephanie Patrick decides to get revenge. She seeks out an ex-MI6 agent (Jude Law) to teach her everything that she will need to know in order to find and kill the men responsible. After a training montage, she sets out to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. The thing is that terrorists aren’t exactly listed in the yellow pages and if she wants to get to them, she’s going to have to do some terrible things first. Luckily, Stephanie is pretty much dead inside so she doesn’t have much of an issue getting blood on her hands. 

I like Blake Lively a lot and not just because she’s married to my man crush, Ryan Reynolds. In some ways, she’s followed in his footsteps, tackling similar types of films to ones that he’s done (The Shallows is pretty much a one-woman suspense-thriller, similar in nature to Reynold’s Buried). We’ve never gotten a chance to see taking names and kicking ass on the big screen (more often she’s the damsel in distress). Lively proves to be one thing that The Rhythm Section gets right. Her take on the character is one that is seemingly detached to what is happening around her but has the kind of anger simmering beneath the surface that will push her to the extreme to get the job done. More than that, there’s a believability to the violent scenes she’s in. She convinces you that she can take a beating just as much as she can dish it out. Not because she’s better or faster, but because she’s more determined than her opponents. I would certainly love to see her do more action films in the future since she has a surprising talent for it.

Mark Burnell was hired to adapt his novel into the screenplay for The Rhythm Section. Some people might assume that writing is writing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. A novel is a very different kind of animal from a screenplay because it is much more of a visual medium. In a novel, you can tell the reader things like “adrenaline coursed through her veins as she looked at the man across from her” or “her life flashed before her eyes as she struggled for the knife.” In a film, you have to say or show what the characters are thinking. There’s also the issue that the act structure is much stricter when it comes to cinema. You’re confined to a certain amount of time and there is a lot that you have to cover before the end. This means that the first act has to end early enough for the second act to have enough time to build towards the inevitable confrontation/final battle in the third act. The Rhythm Section fails to give enough consideration to the act structure and relationships between the characters to pay off in the end. It misses those big emotional beats because it doesn’t take the time to show us what the mean for the characters. This causes many of the “devastating” moments to be anti-climactic and meaningless.

Besides featuring a woman in the lead role, The Rhythm Section feels very much like a movie we’ve seen before. It carefully follows the recipe of spy/assassin-thriller genre but ends up using bottom shelf ingredients and fails to add any spice to it. The result is a bland movie that comes dangerously close to be flat out boring if not for the efforts of Lively and Law. They can only shoulder so much of the weight. It quickly becomes a clumsy and cliched mess as though director Reed Morano couldn’t decide whether to take risks or play it safe. Because of that, The Rhythm Section lurches about uncertain of where it’s going or what it should be doing with itself. It abandons all logic and reason as it forces its way from scene to scene only because it believes that it has to. By the end, it’s hard to care what happens to any of the characters because The Rhythm Section never gives us a good reason to.

The Rhythm Section certainly had a lot of potential, but lacks the insight to fully realize it. Academically, it had a good idea of what makes a good vigilante movie but doesn’t understand why those elements work. Stephanie is a character who has a reason to want revenge, but she never grows beyond that. We never get to see her go from “I want to get revenge for my family” to “I want to make sure this never happens again to anyone else.” Sure, she goes from prostitute to ultra assassin, but so did La Femme Nikita. Sure, she finds a grizzled old man to teach her to kill, but so did American Assassin. Sure, she’s a woman in a genre that is dominated by men, but so was Peppermint. The Rhythm Section offers us nothing new and exciting. Only the same old cliches and tropes, but without even the effort to make them interesting.