The Rhythm Section stars Blake Lively as a woman out to avenge her family killed in a terrorist attack. Jude Law plays the man who trains her. Sterling K. Brown plays the mystery man who is somehow connected to the attack. I saw the preview so many times that I felt compelled to finish the movie, and I have a weakness for women looking for revenge. When I found out that a woman directed the film, I decided to prioritize seeing it on opening weekend to make sure that her first opportunity would not be her last. Also I enjoyed my first encounter with Blake Lively in A Simple Favor (review to come) was positive so I thought that she could handle the role and kick ass.
During the opening scenes of The Rhythm Section, I realized that it was not going to satisfy. It started with the overused How We Got Here trope by opening with a scene that does not fully unfold until later in the film. Then it cuts to show us what the protagonist was doing before that scene. I believe that films always have a moment when there is a frank admission of its shortcomings, and that moment comes when her trainer assesses the protagonist’s past by calling it a cliché. If I was not a completist, I would have walked out of the film fairly early with the intercutting of the protagonist’s memories of her perfect past with the squalor of her present. I almost want to commission a study on families of terrorist victims to see if their career paths change so dramatically after tragedy strikes. Those flashbacks never stop coming, and they are the same damn flashbacks. I want to pass a law on how frequently you can show the same scene within a certain time span. Also the best movies on grief eventually show how the memory and the reality are completely different, but the movie just uses grief as window dressing and never plunges its depths.
Another mistake that The Rhythm Section makes is choosing to depict most scenes using chaos cinema when not deliberately showing her point of view so we still feel as if we are in her shoes or at least right beside her. I despise chaos cinema on principle, but it is really annoying in this film because for the first third of the film when the film is trying to get me invested in the story, I am completely dispassionate as we see her go in and out of consciousness or not directly look at people so we get a nice shot of Law’s boots when we first meet him. By the time that I started to get a chance to truly focus, I was emotionally checked out. A problem that it shared with the flashbacks is that a true memory would not include Lively in the frame, and if it was a recording that she was playing on her cell phone, then who was shooting it? It is the same problem with the film. Visually it was a mistake to make it so much from her point of view. It had the opposite of the intended effect of empathizing with her.
When I saw Peppermint, I recall that I wished we saw how the woman out for revenge trained to go from housewife to deadly assassin. Well, The Rhythm Section gave me that so what is the problem now? This film is really torn between being realistic while still embracing being an action film. It is possible to do both, but the film should be called The Rhythmless Section because it never finds a way to strike that balance. The film begins to work when the protagonist starts going on missions and finds out what she is and is not good at and what kind of bad ass she is going to be because she never can stick to the plan. Unfortunately that portion of the film is the final act. The best scene is when Lively and Amira Ghazalla who plays another surviving relative of a victim comes to an understanding with her, but even that scene is ridiculous because she has to have Supergirl’s hearing to hear the protagonist’s proposal from another room. There are not enough scenes that feel like thrilling, fresh encounters.
The Rhythm Section never quite nails how people interact. There is a scene when the protagonist loses sight of the target of her surveillance, but nothing really comes from that moment of tension. The story never quite comes together so while I came for a vengeance film, the international spy thriller dominates, but is weakened from bearing no resemblance to real life international politics. Instead it feels as if the filmmakers took their favorite elements from Alias, La Femme Nikita and Captain Marvel. The problem with feeling above watching comic book movies, which to my knowledge no one from this film has stated that they were on the record, but it is obvious considering that they are not aware that Law trained another powerful woman getting over trauma, and the filmmakers did not work hard enough to distinguish those training sequences from each other. He feels too unintentionally similar to his Marvel character so a scene that is supposed to pack an emotional punch and actually is an effectively jarring moment in the film, feels expected. There is something so flat about this mentor mentee relationship, and it is the entire middle of the film. I actually predicted one tango that was supposed to be a surprise.
Apparently The Rhythm Section is an adaptation of the first in a three book series, and the writer of that series wrote the script. Yikes. Guess that I will not be reading that series. Normally I would wonder if the film was not faithful to the book, and while a brief glance at the summary of the first book suggests that it is not, if he thinks that it is, then the book cannot be that great. I will admit that I would prefer a more traditional vengeance film, which is embodied in the action sequence before the denouement, and I appreciate the effort to inject a little realism into the premise, but if it is going to be realistic, it has to be thorough and consistent. I think that they were aiming at beginning a franchise, but we have to like most of the first movie before we want a sequel, and the films takes too long to find its stride. The protagonist was too much of a cypher, an archetype, for me to get invested in her journey until I finally saw her in action and learned about her character based on her style of fighting.
The Rhythm Section’s cast should not be blamed for the film’s shortcomings. They did their best, but the filmmakers failed them in terms of visual style, narrative structure and character development. If by some miracle there is a sequel, I would only watch it if there was an entirely new creative team behind the scenes because now that the protagonist has reembraced her identity, we can maybe hit the ground running, but I do not think that this team knows the best way to portray her. Watch it at home and fast forward through the majority of the film. You won’t miss much.