Atomic Blonde is a hyperstylized Cold War spy thriller from stuntman-turned-director David Leitch, who co-directed 2014's John Wick with Chad Stahleski, who handled this year's John Wick: Chapter 2. Their sensibilities are fairly similar, especially when it comes to fight scenes; no surprise considering they're the owners of "action design" studio 87Eleven.
Atomic Blonde suggests that intricate, John le Carré-esque triple-cross narratives are not Leitch's forte—he has fallen to the same I'm-a-storyteller impulse that kneecapped all the subsequent work from the team behind the stripped-down 2011 martial arts landmark The Raid. It's messily adapted from the sedate, black-and-white 2012 Oni Press comic The Coldest City by scriptwriter Kurt Johnstad, whose resume includes macho fare like 300 (2006), 300: Rise of an Empire (2014), and Navy propaganda film Act of Valor (2012).
It's 1989, weeks before the Berlin Wall comes down. The first thing we hear is Ronald Reagan urging Mr. Gorbachev to tear it down, as onscreen text insists this is not that story. New Order's "Blue Monday 1988" is on the soundtrack — the first of many, many needle drops, both period-appropriate and, uh, well, Marilyn Manson.
Johnstad keeps the comic's framing device, as Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron, rocking a litany of Debbie Harry looks) debriefs her MI6 handlers (including Toby Jones and James Faulkner), and attendant CIA agent Emmett Kurzfeld (John Goodman) on a botched mission in Berlin. James Gasciogne (Sam Hargrave), an undercover MI6 agent in possession of a list that endangers seemingly every spy agency on the planet, was killed in Berlin. The list, an "atomic bomb of information," is missing; it never made it to Gasciogne's Stasi contact Spyglass. Broughton is dispatched to find it. Oh, and there's a double agent in the agency, codenamed "Satchel."
In Berlin, Broughton meets the station chief James Percival (James McAvoy). The reference to the Percival of Arthurian legend is less important than the presence of Machiavelli's The Prince on Percival's bookshelf, which codes him as manipulative and self-interested. Broughton name-checks the book for the audience. Percival has "gone native," according to MI6; drinking and fucking himself into a stupor. But we see him chasing The List, locating Spyglass, and generally doing spy work. It's obvious well before anyone else in the film catches on that Percival is meant to be Satchel — especially since there's really only one other main character besides Broughton and Percival — but for some reason that revelation is delayed until late in the plot.
That plot is not so oppressively dense as it sounds. Leitch and Johnstad cut the story down to Broughton and Percival's attempts to find the list and get Spyglass out of East Berlin. The third player is Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella), a rookie DGSE agent who gets romantically involved with Broughton. This narrow focus means the film meanders through a bunch of low-energy developments before the big set piece where Spyglass is smuggled across the wall. Johnstad's script holds the identity of Satchel close to its vest until the climax, and given how obviously Percival is set up to be Satchel, that can only mean one thing: He's not.
I would compare Atomic Blonde's narrative structure to a certain Bryan Singer movie from 1995, but that would totally spoil it. Suffice it to say that in working so hard to deceive the audience, the film inadvertently makes Broughton look like a moron — Percival frequently lies to her face and acts suspiciously, yet she doesn't appear to suspect him. There is a good reason for her waiting until she has hard proof, but again, for most of the film's runtime she simply looks dense.
Leitch couldn't care less, though. Atomic Blonde is a film of surfaces, of meme-like neon Retro Wave production design and secondhand soundtrack choices; from "Cities in Dust" to "The Politics of Dancing" to "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" it's like a Best Of The 80s dance playlist, give or take a Health cover of "Blue Monday" here and a Marilyn Manson track there. Manson had a song in John Wick, too, so I guess we know which director really digs his stuff.
DP Jonathan Sela, who worked with Leitch on John Wick, uses wide-angle lenses almost exclusively, warping every straight line in the outer thirds of the frame like a funhouse mirror. The image is tinted a cold, dim gray when it's not vivid with red and blue neon, and there are a few good editing jokes courtesy of Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir. As a sop to the #nastywoman crowd, Johnstad includes a brief exchange between Broughton and an assailant which I will reproduce in full here: "Take this, bitch," the bad guy says, putting Broughton in a chokehold. She stabs him in the face with a corkscrew. "Am I your bitch now?" she says.
Most of the fight scenes are fairly restrained, save for a grueling brawl during the Spyglass extraction attempt. Here Leitch and his crew subtly stitch together several long takes into a single sequence where Broughton fights off a handful of attackers. The choreography is more grounded than the John Wick norm, making the audience feel the characters' exertion. It's missing some essential spark, though, and I have to allow that this may be my personal distaste for this kind of fight scene. If I wanted to watch people actually fight, with minimal editing, I'd watch an MMA match. As former stuntmen it's no surprise that the Wick duo want to showcase as much of their work as possible, but the insistence on placid long shots and uninterrupted takes means every fight moves at the same tempo, and in the end they feel interchangeable outside of their duration.
Ultimately Atomic Blonde coyly provides its own raison d'être in the form of an MTV clip of Kurt Loder reporting on the tiresome late-80s controversy about sampling in music.
"Is it art, or just plagarism?" he asks. Leitch and company tap into the faux-retro, nostalgia-overdose fever gripping contemporary pop culture, a reiteration of an invented aesthetic that only exists in our collective memory, what Leitch called "a fantasy 80's" in the LA Times. It's a violent confection, a showcase for the many ways to light Charlize Theron's face.
This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 3, 2017.