Review: Atomic Blonde

Atomic Blonde, based on Antony Johnson and Sam Hart's 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City, is the first solo directorial effort from David Leitch, who co-helmed the equally hyperstylised action flick John Wick with Chad Stahelski (though only Stahelski was credited). Leitch, a former stuntman, continues to prove his prowess with staging viscerally kinetic sequences though unlike John Wick, which never took its foot off the accelerator, Atomic Blonde takes too many breaks from the action and often ends up grinding to an albeit always visually engaging halt.

There is certainly no more atomic blonde working in the movies today than Charlize Theron, whose MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton is introduced emerging from an ice bath, her face and body awash in bruises. There's never any doubt that Lorraine is an ice-cold warrior who trusts no one and who will take down any and all comers. Witness the calm efficiency with which she dispatches the two men who have come to drive her to her hotel in Berlin - one is disarmed before he has time to take two breaths and kicked out of the speeding car, the other barely gets a word out before the car overturns coming out of the tunnel. Not too long after that, she's rappelling out of a window holding onto a rope she's tied around the neck of some poor goon who's just trying to do his job.

Then there's the highlight of the film, a sequence made to look like a single, unbroken shot that has her battling a whole slew of KGB agents à la Old Boy in a glamorously decrepit building in Berlin and ends with her driving in a car, the camera inside turning this way and that to show us the surrounding action. It's a showstopper and a prime example of how the action itself is the narrative. Unfortunately, instead of following the streamlined approach to the story that served him and Stahelski so well in John Wick (man seeks revenge, mayhem ensues), Leitch and screenwriter Kurt Johnstad add elements that distract, none more superfluously so than the framing device that has Lorraine in an interrogation session with MI6 investigator Gray (Toby Jones) and CIA agent Kurzfeld (John Goodman) explaining what went down during her mission in West Berlin.

The mission concerns tracking down a KGB assassin who recently murdered an MI6 agent, from whom he stole a list containing the names and whereabouts of every British intelligence officer. The list, as Gray tells Lorraine, is "an atomic bomb of information that could extend the Cold War for another 40 years." The KGB assassin is still in Berlin, so Lorraine must find him and retrieve the list before anyone else can. She's reluctantly paired with the MI6's man in Berlin, one David Percival (James McAvoy), who is all but certifiably unhinged and whose loyalties may have been compromised. Percival has access to an East German operative (Eddie Marsan), who has committed the entire list to memory and who is willing to trade his knowledge if Percival will help him defect. Also in the mix is newbie French agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella), who starts off surveilling Lorraine and ends up in bed with her.

Set just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Atomic Blonde revels in its period setting, perfectly capturing the neon-lit seediness of its environs and deploying a soundtrack filled with the likes of New Order's "Blue Monday '88," David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out the Fire)," 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry," and George Michael's "Father Figure," many of which serve as the musical backdrop to the film's spectacular action sequences. Leitch reunites with John Wick cinematographer Jonathan Sela, who once again beautifully showcases Leitch's complex, brutal, and often witty fight choreography.

Atomic Blonde

Directed by: David Leitch

Written by: Kurt Johnstad; based on the graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnson and Sam Hart

Starring: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Til Schweiger, Eddie Marsan, Sofia Boutella, Toby Jones