The director of Atomic Blonde, David Leitch has never directed a feature film before, but he has loads of experience as a stuntman, a stunt double and a stunt coordinator, and it shows. Atomic Blonde puts out almost two hours of stunts. As British intelligence operative Lorraine Broughton, Charlize Theron leaps, turns, twists, rolls, gives mighty kicks to her enemies, gets whacked around plenty herself – yet always rises in victory. It’s terrific, in its way, and a triumph of film technology, but there’s not much else to the picture.
Atomic Blonde operates in high fever. There’s not much down time, because even when things go quiet, there’s no doubt the rest is momentary. Like a comic book, there are also no neutral or quiet zones. The whole film feels charged and restless. Even the conversations are quick, and shot from angles that keep you on edge. On the other hand nobody in the movie has much to say.
At the start, Lorraine Broughton is called on the carpet at Britain’s famous spy agency MI 6 to explain herself, so she describes her recent trip to Berlin where it seems there are no normal people with jobs, or people shopping -- only agents of various countries all betraying whatever alliances anyone thinks exist and then ambushing, punching, stabbing, shooting, kicking, wrenching necks and tossing bodies off bridges. Lorraine’s task is to get a list that was taken from a murdered agent, but this movie has nothing to do with any lists – it’s what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, something that drives the characters but the audience couldn’t care less about it.
Atomic Blonde lives entirely in the physical. The movie runs in constant motion, but the picture doesn’t make you think about anything – it’s just jangling and visceral sensation. What’s missing, obviously, is the brain part of human life. You don’t get any wit here, no playfulness, aside from a couple of obligatory and dull-minded jokes. Among the pleasures of spy movies is the brain game, characters out-thinking each other and trying to figure out who stands where and who stands with whom.
At heart, spies are people who lie most of the time. They lead secret lives; they sacrifice things like integrity of character or allegiance or personal loyalty to the notion of a higher cause. And the good spy pictures make the audience understand and feel the loss of those essential parts of human life. Spies lead lives that are fundamentally unstable – which is fascinating to see on screen. But Atomic Blonde is all body, and it gives up too much by that limitation.
It gets dull and repetitive. For all the excitement of the first part of the picture, and for all its imagination, the film begins to drag. You don’t know what will happen, or how the bad guys will attack Lorraine, but you do know that they will attack, and that great tumult will follow, with throbbing electronic music to juice up the action even more. But no matter what, dear Lorraine will prevail. And with no real story or human question to sustain the action, it finally becomes just noise.
It is refreshing though that compared to Wonder Woman, Atomic Blonde doesn’t clutter itself with messages. It’s got a tough, acrobatic, self-determining woman at its center who isn’t forced to serve bad history. There’s no b-s. about her. Her name isn’t mythical like Diana – it’s grounded. She’s just Lorraine. And the film itself goes by that raunchy title, Atomic Blonde. She’s a badass, not a “wonder.” Charlize Theron will be 42 years old in a few days, and the movie doesn’t try to make her look like she’s 20. But Atomic Blonde isn’t being talked about as a role model for young girls – this film is an R, while Wonder Woman got a PG-13. And the Atomic Blonde has sex . . . with a woman.
