109 min | R | January 31, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
Stephanie Patrick loses her family in a plane crash and learns it was no accident. She trades grief for a gun and goes hunting the people who built the bomb. The training montage is more convincing than the revenge.
Stephanie Patrick is a wreck. She loses her family in a plane crash and falls into addiction and sex work. A journalist tells her the crash was a bombing and that the bomber walks free. She decides to become an assassin and kill everyone responsible. The Rhythm Section presents itself as a revenge thriller. It is really about grief looking for a target and never finding one that fixes anything.
Blake Lively plays Stephanie with raw commitment. She does not glamorize the wreckage. She is gaunt and shaking and bad at violence, which is the most honest thing in the film. Jude Law plays Iain Boyd, the former intelligence officer who trains her, with a cold contempt that never warms into mentorship. Sterling K. Brown plays Marc Serra, an information broker, with a slick charm the script wastes on too few scenes. Lively carries the weight and the film keeps handing her dead air to carry it through.
Reed Morano directs from a script Mark Burnell adapts from his own novel. Morano comes from cinematography and shoots Stephanie’s world in cold, desaturated grays that match her numbness. The standout is a car chase staged as a single unbroken take from inside the vehicle. The camera stays pinned in the seat while the crash physics throw the frame around. It is a genuine piece of craft trapped in a film that does not build toward it. The rest of the action is choppy and the cutting turns the geography into confusion.
The Rhythm Section wants the grit of a real espionage story and the catharsis of a revenge fantasy. It commits to neither. Stephanie is too broken to be a competent killer and too driven to stop, and the film mistakes that contradiction for depth. The kills bring her no peace and the script knows it but offers nothing in its place. Lively gives this more than it gives back. The result is a thriller that earns its bleakness and forgets to be exciting.