THE RHYTHM SECTION (2020) FILM REVIEW

***

15, 109 Mins

Blake Lively makes a uniquely unsexy audition for Bond.

When was the last time you saw a female-led action movie that didn't feature its leading lady in lycra, hotpants or a bikini? These movies often spoil their empowering measure of women's badassery with leering shots of breasts and buttocks as they kick arsenal. If you cast your mind to any of the big female action icons at the moment whether they be Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman or Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn in the upcoming 'Birds of Prey' (2020), they've all have been sexualised in one way or another.

'The Rhythm Section' (2020) thus stands out as a uniquely unsexy actioner. With the exception of one scene in which she poses as a prostitute, an unrecognizable Blake Lively - one of the world's most diserable women - spends the majority of this muscular espionage thriller make-up free, matted haired and battered and bruised. She stars as Stephanie Patrick - a woman who reinvents herself as an assasin on trail of the terrorists who killed her family in a plane crash. She's self-destructive, smack-smoking and three-dimensionally flawed with a lack of love and sex life that would make 'The Killing's DCI Sarah Lund proud.

This film's Bechdel test-beating panache is surprising coming from producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli whose James Bond series's chauvinistic "wooings" hardly make it the most PC franchise. And yet - as 007 has caught up with the times in recent years - the intention with 'The Rhythm Section' is clear.

This is a brutal reconstruction of the more level playing field that came with early Craig Era Bonds. Something which certainly shows in the hypothermic, Scottish Highland-set training scenes - with Jude Law's beleagured MI6 Agent - that deliberately nods to 'Skyfall's 'Straw Dogs'-style third act. Yet it's in the breakneck fight scenes where 007's touch is strongest with a shaky cam-ridden physical punch to them that reminds audiences of 'Casino Royale's debt to Paul Greengrass's 'Jason Bourne' films.

​Lively commits herself to the action with femur-cracking gusto. She fights badly like a real person expressing bare-knuckle pain and heft - not an invincible superhero like Pierce Brosnan which always made him the most ridiculous of 007 incarnations. You'll feel yourself wanting to shout "C'OR BLIMEY! SHE'S GETTING HURT!" as the blows come smacking into her ribs.

Lively's assured performance and gritty direction from former cinematographer Reed Morano smooth over the 'Taken'-style trashiness of the revenge-fuelled plot. As a result, I'm dying to see a female James Bond with Lively in the lead and Morano in the director's chair. It's apparent from this movie that Wilson and Broccoli are ready to move forward, not backward. Even if this doesn't turn out to be the lead actress's audition for Jane Bond, a new franchise is on the cards for this vengeful antiheroine. This is a solid, efficient B-Movie.
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