Atomic Blonde

The best thing about 2017's ATOMIC BLONDE is its title.  It's one of those word plays I wished I'd thought of, maybe to describe a combustive ex girlfriend.  Kinda also sounds like a comic book character.  The movie is in fact based on a graphic novel by Antony Johnston called The Coldest City.  The ingredients for a tight action thriller are all there, but director David Leitch's movie really falls short.  The less than stellar script of such a movie can be ignored, usually, if everything else delivers the goods. Consider several James Bond adventures.  While ATOMIC BLONDE has style to burn and a sold performance from its lead actress, Kurt Johnstad's poor screenplay relegates this movie to cinematic limbo, not quite bad enough to be erased from the hard drive but far from worthy of inclusion in the National Film Registry.

Charlize Theron plays the lead role, a British spy named Lorraine Broughton, who is recruited to travel to Berlin to retrieve a highly coveted list of Intelligence agents.  The list is contained in a wristwatch, and has the names of those snooping for the East and the West.  An MI6 agent, one with whom Broughton was close, loses his life over the list to the KGB.  Those sneaky Soviets also do their damndest to take out our atomic blonde out as she races and fights around the Berlin Wall, which will come down during this story.   Broughton has a contact named David Percival (James McAvoy) who seems to love living in a city filled with deception and double (perhaps even triple) agents. Can he be trusted?  What about the mysterious Delphine (Sofia Boutella), a French agent who does a flagrantly bad job of covert tailing but might make an appealing lover for Lorraine?

ATOMIC BLONDE's storyline is jumbled nonsense, with indications that the filmmakers wanted to shoehorn some astute observations on the nasty business of spying during the waning days of the Cold War.  Mainly, actual news clips and a soundtrack of '80s pop and alternative songs are used (with mild success) to create a sense of time and place; the often wince inducing CGI does not do so well. A semi-graphic sexual encounter feels tacked on.  Jonathan Sela's cinematography is colorful, a cinematic candy store.

Some of the action scenes are good, especially a lengthy fight between Lorraine and several who try to kill the German defector (who's memorized the List), who is under her protection.  It is during this scene that Theron shows she has the stuff action heroes are made of (proven earlier in MAD MAX FURY ROAD).  I like how the film shows her impressive blocks and kicks, and how she gets injured, unlike some fantastic, phony superhero.  She gets to kick ass, but she's still a human.

But, that, script........

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