Review: The Rhythm Section Is Gonna Get You with Self-Seriousness

The premise of Reed Morano’s The Rhythm Section is oriented more toward comedy than suspense. Its protagonist, Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively), is a civilian who’s dragged into a network of spies and turncoats, tasked with tracking down an anonymous terrorist despite her manifest lack of training and innate pluck in anything to do with intelligence or wetwork. The potential for great parody is certainly high as she bumbles across the globe making a thorough mess of things. But the film, adapted by Mark Burnell from his own novel, plays the material with fatal severity, starting with the fact that Stephanie is drawn to the case because the terrorist in question orchestrated a plane bombing that claimed the lives of her entire family, condemning her to a life of drug addiction and prostitution.

Morano, directing her third feature, brings her experience as a cinematographer with a considerable knack for spotlighting the bleakness and grittiness of people’s lives to bear on early scenes of Stephanie at rock bottom. Close-ups of the woman’s face emphasize her jaundiced complexion and the purple blemishes that mark her skin like craters on the moon. These harsh, desaturated images convey the psychological toll of Stephanie’s loss, but they also feel like the latest iterations of the hackneyed cliché of actresses being uglified for the sake of prestige, a ruination meant to suggest the horror of seeing an attractive woman lose her beauty. Similarly, Stephanie’s moments of drug-induced escape are shot in that woozy, soft-focus style that’s been the pat standard for depicting drug trips for decades on screen.

The woman is saved from this downward spiral by Keith (Raza Jaffrey), a reporter who’s uncovered evidence that the plane crash that killed her family was indeed a terrorist bombing, despite official reports to the contrary. Why a reporter who put multiple locks on his apartment door out of paranoia would go out of his way to involve the relative of some of the victims in his investigation into a potential conspiracy, particularly a woman whose drug addictions and trauma make her a wild card, is nothing short of baffling. Sure enough, filling such a loose cannon with sudden dreams of revenge only manages to get the man killed within hours, leaving Stephanie to try to pick up the pieces of his investigation by reaching out to his anonymous source, ultimately revealed to be ex-MI6 agent Iain Boyd (Jude Law).

The initial scenes centered around Boyd as he hides out near a Scottish loch suggest that The Rhythm Section might just become something of a dark comedy. Inexplicably, Boyd decides to weaponize Stephanie’s desire for vengeance, leading to a two-for-the-price-of-one montage in which he both cures her of her addictions through exercise and trains her in the basics of combat. Thus every moment of breakdown and perseverance is made doubly important, and Boyd’s harassing taunts to a woman he just met are played as tough-love encouragement. All of this is ridiculous, and for a moment it seems intentionally so when Boyd tests his new protégée’s skills and immediately humiliates her because no one can realistically become an unstoppable killer after only a few weeks’ worth of intense jogging and target practice.

It’s then that Boyd puts Stephanie “into the field” to track down the terrorist responsible for the bombing, sending her on a globetrotting venture to interrogate and kill rogue intelligence agents, bomb-makers, and other nefarious types. Along the way, her attempts at clandestine action and roleplay and committing assassinations are executed so disastrously that she makes Inspector Clouseau look like George Smiley. At one point, Morano shoots a chase in a single take from the passenger seat of a car that Stephanie steals in Tangier and races through narrow streets, plowing through so many vegetable carts and trash bins that, were it not for the film’s mirthlessness, the destruction could pass as a parody of movie car chases.

So much of the film feels retrograde, right down to the obligatory Islamophobia, though it’s some kind of progress that the unknown Muslim terrorist is described by one of his connections (Sterling K. Brown) as only being driven by greed, committing atrocities “for profit, not the prophet.” The Rhythm Section, with its clumsy heroine, unintriguing mystery, and absurd plotting, shouldn’t be the self-serious bore that it is. Its occasional gestures toward pseudo-feminist empowerment only compound what a hollow protagonist Stephanie is, forcing a chaotic, unskilled character into a thematic role as ill-fitting as her new occupation.