The Rhythm Section is rhythmless: Great cast, bad movie
The Rhythm Section, starring Blake Lively and Jude Law, arrived in theaters this past weekend. Should you be looking to buy a ticket?
I don’t enjoy writing bad reviews. Any time I watch a movie, I try to find something positive to say about it. The goal I go for in my reviews is always to help the reader know if this is a movie they would enjoy, whether I did or din’t. With The Rhythm Section, this is a difficult task as I’m not sure there’s anything I liked.
The trailer has a great song, shows some good action scenes, and presents Blake Lively (Gossip Girl) as an intriguing protagonist. The Rhythm Section is a movie about a woman out for revenge after losing her family in a terrorist attack that was covered up as an accident. I expected great action scenes and a conspiracy that is unraveled throughout the course of the movie. What The Rhythm Section delivered was something else entirely.
The Good
Again, I do like to find the good in any movie. With The Rhythm Section, the one thing that I did appreciate was that they took a realistic approach to having Blake Lively’s character, Samantha Patrick, turn into a killer.
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At the start of the movie, she’s a depressed college student, drugged out of her mind and working in a brothel. It would have been pretty ridiculous to have her develop into a cold-blooded killer within the first 15 minutes or so of the movie. Instead, they take a slow approach where she has to train for months to develop certain skills.
Jude Law (Captain Marvel) plays the trainer for this portion of the film and their time together is the strongest part of the movie. Even after all of her training, though, none of the operations she goes on go smoothly. This is fine, except that we never get to a point of taking her seriously as we go from one operation to the next.
What could have been a good thing ends up being the reason the film doesn’t work by the end.
The Bad
Early on in the movie, the conspiracy is laid out for us. It’s not much of a mystery as to what happened, but there is some mystery around who did it. We know one of the players, but there’s a mystery man who they need to find before that player can be taken out.
A few men are introduced on Samantha’s way to solving this mystery, and at a certain point the names start running together. You’ll forget who is who and, in a significant moment, a name will be said that seems to mean everything to the character in the scene, but you’ll need a moment to remember who they’re talking about. Because of this, many of the more dramatic moments in the movie don’t land.
Also, because half of the movie is spent training Samantha to be a spy, once she’s out in spy world there isn’t a ton of time to develop connections with the people she meets. One of those characters being Sterling K. Brown‘s Mark Serra. She’s supposed to get close to him so he’ll trust her and give her info, but the way this is portrayed in the movie won’t register with the audience. The supposed connection between the two was incredibly rushed.
By the end of the movie, when it’s time to finally solve the mystery, you won’t feel that moment the way the writer/director wanted you to.
Overall
Being able to look back on The Rhythm Section, it probably would have been great as a television show. They wanted to portray a complicated conspiracy and show us glimpses of spy life with an accurate portrayal of how difficult the job is. They do that to a certain extent but then they have to come to a conclusion by the end of the film.
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This rushed conclusion doesn’t land the way it was meant to because we didn’t get to feel much buildup to the resolution. If the intention was for this to turn into a franchise, then maybe you can look at this film as an ok origin story, but as a standalone it is mostly unsatisfying.
If you need to see for yourself, The Rhythm Section is still showing in theaters.