(Review of Atomic Blonde, Currently in wide release
***1/2 out of five
by Walter G. Tarrow
Once again we are gifted the masochistic anti-hero(ine). Allegedly with us since the age of East/West Berlin, the Cold(est) War(City), Lorraine B, the titular ( heh. heh. just wanted to use the word) Atomic Blonde first appears to us bruised and battered soaking in a bath of ice, a metaphor for what flows through her veins.
She recounts how she came to such a painful state while being debriefed by her MI6 bosses and John Goodman currently assigned to the boys at Langley. Toby Jones as her superior (a term AB openly mocks) along with Goodman serve only to move the narrative with opportunities for Charlize to skewer them with her cold disdain and rapier wit. So many vain and stupid duplicitous men. And chief among them a not bald James McAvoy as Percival, or is he really?
Amongst them and above them all, in the thick of things, it’s the Charlize show and that’s why we bought a ticket.
She punches and kicks and body slams and uses common items like ropes and keys and corkscrews and hot plates and umbrellas to bring down her mayhem in ways inconceivable to men. And, it’s very important to note, with little, if any, collateral damage.
And, oh, she’s got luck. Lotsa luck.
Her weakness, her vulnerability is that she has loved and lost. Yet, in spite of the pain, being a deeply profound masochist, she continues to love. And no doubt so will the loss be always there.
And the cigarettes! So many cigarettes! No mistaking that this was a time when only the coolest of the cool inhaled deeply.
David Leitch, now more than a stunt director, uses his John Wick experience to craft in neon a Refn-like film of a comic book with plenty of fancy camera angles, nifty dissolves and spray painted titles.
The plot is simple but far from elegant with needless double, triple, quadruple crosses and the requisite scenes of exposition dragging down the film, but not fatally so.
In the final analysis, it’s Charlize and Charlize and Charlize…
Hopefully…
Atomic Blonde will return