It’s been a few years since we’ve seen Blake Lively on screen, the actress-entrepreneur having last appeared in 2018’s A Simple Favor. Her new movie, The Rhythm Section, is set to hit theaters this weekend.
Based on a book of the same name by Mark Burnell (who also penned the script adaptation), it tells the story of Stephanie Patrick, a typical college student in the U.K. who suffers a devastating loss when her entire family is killed in a plane crash. After three years of spiraling, prostitution, and drug use, Stephanie is offered a glimmer of hope in the form of a journalist who informs her the crash wasn’t an accident but was deliberately orchestrated. Armed with a newfound sense of direction and something to live for, Stephanie embarks on a mission of vengeance as she vows to take out every single person involved in the crash that murdered her family and the hundreds of other victims on the flight.
The book is the first in a series of thriller novels about Stephanie Patrick. Is the film good enough to launch an action franchise for Blake Lively? Or is it simply a good way to pass a few hours at the theater in the middle of the January doldrums? Read on to find out.
1. Blake Lively Is Genuinely Phenomenal
If there is one truly bright spot in this movie, it’s Blake Lively’s performance. Lively hasn’t gotten the credit she deserves throughout her career, thanks largely to people associating her with Gossip Girl – time and again it’s been shown female-skewing YA content is unfairly rarely taken seriously – but she’s a genuinely talented actor. This may be her best performance yet.
As Stephanie, Lively infuses her performance with a jittery, nervous energy that never fully goes away even after Stephanie has gotten sober. She’s always uncomfortable in her own skin, constantly touching her hair, her mouth, small tics and twitches that humanize the orphan and convey the deep brokenness inside her. Sure, this utter disregard for herself is helped by the fact Lively is constantly enveloped by shapeless, androgynous clothes two sizes too big throughout the movie. But it’s also how Lively plays her. There’s an unsettled restlessness to her performance that goes beyond the bad wig and minimal makeup, the junkie-thin angles. Stephanie walks with a loose-limbed gait, gangly and awkward in how she physically manifests herself in the world that turns hunched and cringing at a moment’s notice. It’s a subtly phenomenal physical performance from Lively that we’ve not seen before, and I’d be deeply interested in seeing her lean into more of these roles.
2. It Makes Some Interesting Choices With Cinematography
Director Reed Morano apparently had a very specific visual style in mind when giving cinematographer Sean Bobbitt his marching orders for this movie. To its credit, The Rhythm Section tries to do something different with basic action fare and attempts to elevate it through distinct visuals more befitting an arthouse film. Whether or not that works is a matter of personal preference. Bobbitt’s cinematography is meant to create a sense of intimacy with Stephanie, to orient us from her point of view. There’s plenty of handheld camerawork creating a jittery sense of urgency that matches Stephanie’s own tension. Shots are often tight on Blake Lively or close-ups that frame every minute expression on her face, every manifestation of her nervousness or grief filling the screen.
It’s also a movie rife with visual symbolism. There are a number of bisected shots in the film, for example, the camera vertically tracking past a horizontal plane of a kitchen table as it follows Stephanie sliding to the floor in grief. Or a literal sink-or-swim scene in which her metaphorical sinking and resurfacing are represented by the camera held at the water’s level, the line of the water’s surface cutting straight across the screen. It’s an interesting bit of visual storytelling, but it doesn’t always work; some head-scratching choices simply make no sense, camera trickery shoehorned in where it doesn’t need to be. The odd decision was made to apparently tell the 1st AC to take the entire shoot off, focus pulling completely abandoned in favor of shots being unnecessarily out-of-focus and staying blurry. Likewise, some curious choices with backlighting were made, leading to a glare in a number of scenes akin to what happens when you try to take a selfie with the front-facing camera on your phone when the flat silver glare of a cloudy day is behind you. For me, it ultimately did not work as a piece of visual tapestry, but still, I have to tip my cap that they tried to do something different with what they had.
3. It’s An Entertaining Action Romp All The Same
Even dolling it up with Lively’s gripping performance and visual flair, The Rhythm Section is a revenge movie at heart, a story about a normal girl turned vengeful assassin. The fascinating thing is that she’s not actually a good assassin. After all, she was just a normal girl who suffered a life-altering tragedy and was shaped by grief, which is not the same thing as being born with the sort of makeup that naturally enables one to be a cold-blooded killer. Stephanie is no suave assassin who has lacks any qualms about shooting targets in the head or slitting their throats. Action sequences are much more “real” to illustrate this point. Hand-to-hand combat is often bangabout and sloppy but it’s more interesting precisely because it’s so raw. John Wick’s slick action choreography is bonkers fun to watch, but there’s something refreshing about the slight gonzo style of the fight scenes in The Rhythm Section with Stephanie panicked and struggling and just trying to get out of a fight with a target alive. The same goes for one pivotal car chase scene, a tense, claustrophobic ride of barely dodging pedestrians and spinning out of control and nearly being shot that is likely a lot closer to what it would actually feel like in reality than anything in a Jason Bourne or Mission: Impossible movie. If you’re looking for the carefully choreographed action scenes that most of us are used to seeing on screen, this isn’t that movie. But it’s an interesting offering of what it might be like if any of us normal citizens were suddenly pulled into the shadowy underworld of wetwork.
All things considered, The Rhythm Section is a fine movie. It’s neither wholly fantastic nor is it wholly forgettable, but it definitely tries something different with the genre. If you’re a fan of action movies, it’s well worth checking out when it hits theaters this weekend.
