The Rhythm Section (2020)

Reed Morano's The Rhythm Section arrived in January 2020 with the quiet dignity of a film its studio had already abandoned, delayed three times and defunded in the marketing department. It opened on more than three thousand screens and earned less in its entire domestic run than most releases manage in a Tuesday matinee. The critics were unkind. The audiences stayed home. The wreckage, however, is more interesting than the reception suggests, because this is a spy thriller that refuses the usual choreography.

Blake Lively plays Stephanie Patrick, a woman hollowed out by grief and heroin, recruited into the assassination trade by a disgraced MI6 man played by Jude Law. The film takes pains to make her bad at it. Her fighting is ugly. Her missions are botched. She survives on luck and on the indifference of men who underestimate her. A female-led genre picture directed by a woman, one that deliberately withholds the femme fatale's polish, registers as a modest progressive gesture, though the film never stops to announce a thesis. Sterling K. Brown appears as a former CIA broker, and the supporting cast is international without making a performance of its own diversity. The representation is present. It is simply not the point.

Elsewhere this is a lean and largely apolitical machine. Islamist terrorism and a murdered Muslim reformer function as plot mechanics, not as an invitation to systemic critique. There is no class anger, no environmental sermon, no moralizing from the pulpit. The villains are terrorists and intelligence brokers, which is to say, businessmen of a different kind. What we have is a grim, patient, unfashionable thriller about a woman learning to kill, and it was punished severely for not being more fun. A sober assessment finds little ideological freight and a fair amount of craft.