The vibe I got from Atomic Blonde's marketing was that it's essentially "female John Wick", and that concept alone was enough to get me interested. After all, one of the co-directors of the first John Wick, David Leitch, was in charge of this film, and anything Charlize Theron does makes me excited. But this film isn't quite the balls-to-the-wall "Charlize kills everyone-athon" that the trailers make it look like. There's certainly a lot of action, and Charlize does kill quite a few people, but it's far more grounded than I expected, and also has a far more complicated story.
Well, it's complicated in how it's presented, but the execution was a bit off. After the death of a British intelligence agent, Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) is sent to Berlin to retrieve a list of double agents that was taken by a rogue KGB officer. When she arrives, she meets up with David Percival (James McAvoy), a deep-cover British agent who tells her about a man known as Spyglass (Eddie Marsan), who's committed the entire list to memory. As Broughton searches for the list and for Spyglass, she finds herself in a hornet's nest of KGB and other foreign intelligence agents, and she has no idea who to trust.
The biggest flaw of Atomic Blonde is that it plays its hand far too early. All throughout the film, everyone talks about this double agent named "Satchel". Satchel is apparently the greatest double agent ever, and nobody knows who he is, so he could be anywhere and be doing anything. Through very repetitive foreshadowing, it becomes very clear who Satchel is, and when that clicks, the rest of the film feels kind of pointless. So much of it is dedicated to throwing you off and making you think that another character is Satchel, but when the tone of a twisty spy mystery is established, you know it's all being set up for a big reveal. In an attempt to make the twist less obvious, the film makes it all the more obvious.
It's a shame, because Atomic Blonde gets pretty much everything else right. It's certainly a stylish film, with a colour scheme that very much matches the black-and-white graphic novel that it's based on. David Leitch knows how to make muted colours stand out, which fits the oppressive, stifling environment of East Berlin. The characters are all dynamic in their own ways, and play their roles perfectly. James McAvoy plays eccentric well, Sofia Boutella plays out-of-her-depth well, Eddie Marsan plays mousy and nervous well, and Roland Møller plays stony-faced KGB leader well. No part of the movie feels wasted or extraneous, which is nice.
The stand-out aspect of the film is the action, and Charlize Theron just owns it. The fights are very different from John Wick; there's no glamourising or heightening, it's very human. When people get hit, they get hurt, cuts and bruises stick with them, and they get tired. Adding these human limitations does a lot to make the action scenes more impressive, and the superb sound design makes every punch hit harder. The sequence that will come to define this film is a minutes-long one-shot action scene down a staircase, which transitions out into a car chase, and ends far beyond the point you would expect. That scene in particular is going to be the go-to reference for action choreography and cinematography for a long time now.
If Atomic Blonde is anything; it's worth seeing. It's not a revolutionary action film that turns the genre on its head, but it is a good time. Despite the brutality of the action, the film just doesn't stick with me; it's a mostly empty experience. If you pay for a ticket to see Charlize Theron be awesome, you'll get your money's worth. I hope this film does well and we see more female-led action movies like this in the future, because it does feel refreshing. But the film doesn't have the emotional depth to back up the complex story, and it's hard to even track the motivation of the protagonist at times. Lorraine Broughton is not going to join the ranks of the best modern action heroes, and Atomic Blonde won't be remembered as much more than "okay".
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