Rhythm Method

The Rhythm Section (2019) is very much a cliche movie: ordinary woman is wronged, becomes a badass and gets revenge. But I like this cliche - so the question is, how well is it executed?

It starts with sun-drenched home movies of a happy, loving family. We find out soon enough that these are flashbacks or cellphone movies that Blake Lively took before her family all died in a plane crash. Now, she is a drug-addicted prostitute, looking pretty rough. Raza Jaffrey, an investigative journalist, finds her and tells her that the plane was actually blown up to kill one of the passengers, a middle-eastern reformist. After having him kicked out of the brothel, she looks him up to get the story. 

Then she steals everything he has of value and buys some junk - and a gun to kill the man he told her built the bomb. She loses her nerve, but he must have gotten wise. When she goes back to Jaffrey, she finds him dead.

From a clue on his big wall-of-clues, she travels to coordinates in Scotland - just like 39 Steps? There, she meets Jude Law, a disgraced MI6 agent living in an abandoned training site. She asks him to train her, and he refuses, but she persists, and he pushes her to the limit, yada-yada. When she's ready, he sends her out on a mission to kill one of the gang who did the bombing. She'll go in dressed as a prostitute - work with what you know. 

After this seasoning, he has her impersonate assassin Petra Reuter, who is dead, but they never found a body. She will work her way through the assassin underground until she finds who ordered the hit that killed her family.

So the outline is pretty standard. How well is it handled? The early section, where Lively is a junkie whore, then an assassin in training, are pretty brutal. She is a lot more believable than, say, Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return. Her training sequence is good because she never gets exactly great - a fair shot, lousy hand-to-hand fighter, etc. She tends to hesitate before a kill, and he hand shakes when she's holding a gun on someone. But the movie does sort of move on rails after she becomes an assassin, losing some of the intensity of the first section. 

Jude Law, older, with a beard, can't do much to get out of the grumpy, reluctant mentor role. 

Even the couple bankrolling the operation, parents of the killed reformist, are good but not exactly new. Played by Nasser Memarzia and Amira Ghazalla, he is suspicious and treats her like a scammer, while his wife is willing to put up the money, just in case. They play it well, but the rich Indian or Mid-Eastern couple where she is the real backbone has been done more than once - in TeneT for ex.

So, a little more depth than, say, Anna, but maybe not as good action. A fine popcorn movie, with Lively giving it a little more harrowing realism in the first act. But I want to say, the idea that she could be a badass, even as a skinny, addicted, bruised prostitute, is not as far-fetched as the movie wants you to think. If it was Renee Zellwigger or someone, it would be a cool transformation. 

In conclusion, the rhythm section refers to your heartbeat and breathing, which an assassin needs to learn to control. They missed a lot of chances to set action to a hot rhythm track - only used it once.