Atomic Blonde Blasts the Past

By Katherine Monk

She’s got more swagger than Dirty Harry and more fun spunk than a pair of Lucille Balls. She’s Lorraine Broughton, an MI6 agent who dresses to kill — as well as kill — with a singular and easy style. Quite simply, the lady knows how to wear it, and when that happens, you may as well pull up a seat and get strapped in for the show.

Don’t resist. It’s a guaranteed pleasure ride for a variety of reasons, most notably, Charlize Theron. The statuesque actor and Dior-sponsored Glamazon proved she had the muscle and sheer athleticism to take us down Fury Road, the re-imagining of Mad Max. Yet, she takes it to a whole different level as Broughton, the central heroine in Atomic Blonde.

Broughton is the embodiment of 1980s feminism: a secret agent with a Debbie Harry haircut and patent leather red stilettos. She’s also entirely of her time, because this whole fantasy is based on a 2008 graphic novel set just before the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. It’s fall 1989, and we find ourselves in the middle of a still-divided Berlin.

Director David Leitch (John Wick, Deadpool 2) gives us the bullet points in spray paint and stencil: The Cold War is about to end, all order is about to crumble along with the Berlin Wall, and the old-fashioned rules of espionage every agent understood are about to go down the toilet like so much cocaine in the middle of a bust.

Broughton is a creature of this milieu, but when she touches down in the divided city, she realizes there’s no safe zone. Even her partner, another MI6 agent named Percival (James McAvoy), is probably compromised — given all the graft lying around his apartment. This is a significant problem, since her primary mission is to recover a list of every agent known to the Stasi, the East German secret police. It contains the identity of every operative working in Europe, as well as a list of their dirty secrets, including hers — as well as Percival’s, and everyone else in the game.

The plot is color-by-numbers spy-vs-spy genre. It’s the execution that makes Leitch’s film a little different because Theron owns it — figuratively, but also literally. Theron was the one who began developing the project for her own production company, looking to play and create a kick-ass super heroine for the 21st century. She’s also the one who does every single lunge, rodeo kick and karate chop.

Theron did every single fight move for the cameras after training with the stunt team responsible for John Wick. It’s a huge asset for the director, because we can get real drama in the same frame as real action.

The plot is color-by-numbers spy-vs-spy genre. It’s the execution that makes Leitch’s film a little different because Theron owns it — figuratively, but also literally. Theron was the one who began developing the project for her own production company, looking to play and create a kick-ass super heroine for the 21st century. She’s also the one who does every single lunge, rodeo kick and karate chop.

Every scene is double-barrelled. All Leitch has to do is aim and shoot. The rest is a splatter-fest of plot, cranial debris and hyper-sexualized interpretations of life in pre-Perestroika Berlin. The plot reloads at regular intervals in an interrogation room, where Broughton is being questioned by her English boss at MI6 (Toby Jones), as well as the CIA’s representative, played with jovial gravitas by John Goodman.

She’s the one offering the narrative, and the flashbacks that propel the story. Leitch brings them to life, with Broughton standing front and centre, letting us get lost in the beautiful chaos.

Scored to a record-collector’s soundtrack of period-evoking songs, from New Order’s Blue Monday ’88 and Public Enemy’s Fight the Power, to The Clash’s London Calling and Til’ Tuesday’s Voices Carry, the immersion is complete — and surprisingly pleasant.

Despite the blood in your eyeballs violence, it’s a romantic waltz down memory lane for any X’er who remembers the era, with all its assumed sophistication communicated through black clothes and hair gel.

Theron nails the tone with her RuPaul walk, her inner allegiance to David Bowie and an Annie Lennox androgyny that defined sexual power in that moment. Today, it almost feels strangely dated, which is another reason why it’s worth forgiving the film’s many flaws: It successfully takes us backward into a different head space — when the fall of Communism seemed to mark the beginning of a new age.

Atomic Blonde bleaches that optimism, reducing it to threadbare notions of nationalism and the odd, tongue-in-cheek wave. We can see through it all now. But then, it all felt so exciting and meaningful.

The script tries to pack it all in, and in the process, does a little too much of everything. A great portion of Atomic Blonde actually vaporizes after you leave the theatre. All that remains is the lingering sensation of having watched Charlize Theron, in closeup and in action, in stripes and in candy-coloured solids, parade before a believable recreation of pre-unification Berlin — which, by the way, was shot mostly in Budapest, Hungary.

Oh well. Like so much of the era, it feels right and works for a while — until you’re walking home  with a little less money in your pocket and a strange, empty feeling inside. It’s a one-nighter with Theron, and though it’s far from perfect, it still leaves a buzz.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS.COM, July 28, 2017

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