{"id":8565,"date":"2024-11-19T00:13:45","date_gmt":"2024-11-19T05:13:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=8565"},"modified":"2024-11-19T00:13:45","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T05:13:45","slug":"the-rhythm-section","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/11\/19\/the-rhythm-section\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rhythm Section"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Rhythm Section <\/strong>(2020)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paramount\/Action-Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 109 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (violence, sexual content, language throughout, some drug use)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Reed Morano\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Mark Burnell\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Steve Mazzaro\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Release date: January 31, 2020 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Max Casella, Daniel Mays, Geoff Bell, Richard Brake, Raza Jaffrey, Jade Anouka, Jack McEvoy, Ivana Basic, David Duggan, Nasser Memarzia, Amira Ghazalla, Tawfeek Barhom.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $5.4M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: **<\/p>\n

\u00a0Blake Lively has come a long way as an actress since the days of Gossip Girl and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. She was terrific in The Town and A Simple Favor. She held her own against a killer shark in The Shallows. The new actioner The Rhythm Section<\/strong> is a huge step back. She\u2019s horribly miscast as a young woman seeking revenge against the terrorists who killed her family in a plane bombing. Grunge look notwithstanding, I didn\u2019t believe her character for a minute. Lively doesn\u2019t have the raw edge or depth required to play such a character. Her spotty British accent only weakens her case further. I kept imagining Keira Knightley in the role. No doubt she could have pulled it off. I\u2019m not so sure she could have done anything much with the familiar material.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Here\u2019s a list of the movies that The Rhythm Section<\/strong> made me think of: Point of No Return, Leon the Professional, Atomic Blonde, Red Sparrow, Peppermint and Anna. All of these titles have strong women at the center of the action. Yes, I\u2019m including Sasha Luss (of Anna) on the list based solely on her ability to kick ass (she can\u2019t act to save her life). All of the female leads in these films are convincingly bad ass. Lively, on the other hand, is NOT. I\u2019ll grant that this is likely by design. After all, her character has no background in violence. She\u2019s not a trained killer or anything like that.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Stephanie Patrick was a student at Oxford when her family (parents, brother and sister) died. The tragedy left her deeply traumatized. An investigative journalist (Jaffrey, Lost in Space) finds her addicted to drugs and working in a London brothel three years later. He informs her that terrorists rather than mechanical failure were responsible for her family being killed. When he ends up dead, Stephanie seeks out an exiled MI6 agent known only as \u201cB\u201d (Law, Captain Marvel) hiding in the Scottish highlands. He helps her get clean and trains her to fight and shoot.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Stephanie has only a few months training under her belt when she goes out looking for blood and recompense. Her mission brings her into contact with Mark (Brown, This Is Us), a former CIA agent who now sells information to the highest bidder. He gives her a few names. She goes after them. Needless to say, none of her hits go as planned. Yet somehow she always makes it out alive. I know that action movies are, by nature, implausible. The Rhythm Section<\/strong> stretches plausibility to the limit and beyond. At least Bridget Fonda had back-up in Point of No Return. Lively\u2019s character goes it alone, a risk that would surely result in her immediate demise given her inexperience and half-assed training.<\/p>\n

\u00a0If I may circle back to Blake Lively briefly, she does make an honest effort at a darker-than-usual role. She really tries. It\u2019s not entirely her fault she doesn\u2019t pull it off. The sheer ordinariness of The Rhythm Section<\/strong> is partly to blame. While I do enjoy a good, globe-trotting action flick that takes its hero\/heroine to exotic locales around the world, it comes off as perfunctory here. There is absolutely nothing about The Rhythm Section<\/strong> that makes it stand out. Aside from a couple of intense, claustrophobic action sequences (a car chase and a fight in a small kitchen), the movie just kind of sits there. It\u2019s drab and dreary. None of the actors appear capable of summoning much in the way of enthusiasm. The screenplay by Mark Burnell, who also wrote the novel upon which it is based, has a truncated feel like he\u2019s taking shortcuts to get from one plot point to the next, sacrificing character development and emotional content in the process. Although Stephanie and B spend several months in a remote, isolated place, we don\u2019t feel any sort of connection between them. Law does solid work as B but it\u2019s all for naught in the end.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The title, if anybody cares, comes from advice Law\u2019s character gives Lively as she practices on the makeshift shooting range. He tells her to calm down and think of her heartbeat and breathing as an orchestra. If only somebody imparted that advice to director Reed Marano (I Think We\u2019re Alone Now). The beat is way off in The Rhythm Section<\/strong>. To its credit, it\u2019s not terrible. It\u2019s watchable but only barely. Given that it\u2019s a January movie, that\u2019s high praise indeed.\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Rhythm Section (2020)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paramount\/Action-Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 109 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (violence, sexual content, language throughout, some drug use)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Reed Morano\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Mark Burnell\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Steve Mazzaro\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Release date: January 31, 2020 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Max Casella, Daniel Mays, Geoff Bell, Richard Brake, Raza Jaffrey, Jade […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8859,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-adventure"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/The-Rhythm-Section-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8565"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8861,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8565\/revisions\/8861"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}