Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) didn't just lose her entire family (parents, two siblings) in a plane crash; she lost her meaning of life, tumbling down a rabbit hole of despair that has her working as a prostitute when we first meet her in Reed Morano's "The Rhythm Section."
It's only when Stephanie finds out that the crash may not have been accidental, but something rooted in more sinister affairs. Ones that people would label as terrorism.
Morano's film covers familiar terrain in a movie that gets some style points yet doesn't really ever come together into a cohesive cinematic force. Part of the reason is Stephanie never really comes off as someone you can lock onto. Even with flashbacks to happy family dinners, you feel too distant from the protagonist to fully get behind her revenge story.
Lively does her best to elevate the material. She's a capable actress that one could classify as underrated, someone who can venture into different genres and even weld a couple of them together. I saw it when she stole a few scenes in Ben Affleck's "The Town," and thought she was engrossing in the shark attack thriller "The Shallows." Here, she doesn't show off many speeds or layers of the character, sticking to morose and violent. Lively changes her appearance up, but it comes off as an extreme attempt at acting instead of something natural.
Stephanie gets those violent abilities from a mysterious ex-military/spy specialist (Jude Law), who doesn't have a name but doesn't own a certain unique set of skills. If you've seen one pedestrian-gets-turned-into-a-fighter montage, you've seen them all. This film's sequence is no different. She goes from throwing lazy haymakers and moving like a 70-year-old to being whipsmart and kill-able. Except for a playful dining room scene, it's all a rehash of something seen before in a better movie.
Law is a highly capable talent who can shape-shift right before our eyes, but he's got nothing to do here yet look tough and teach our lady how to fight. Sterling K. Brown always offers presence, but he literally looks like an actor who walked onto the wrong set.
The bad guys here don't really get a face or much time for character development. Basically, you don't get to see them as much more than far-off criminals who have a secret plan that took away some good people. You don't see the menace in them, because they don't have much to do outside of wearing a name tag saying, "scheduled for a climactic duel near the end of the film."
The tone, pacing, and overall feel of the film is disjointed, split up into a series of scenes and plot twists that feel overly familiar or just poorly developed. This kind of story, based on Mark Burnell's novel (he also wrote the script), could have been better served as a television series, so we could get to know Stephanie more. You can't just show a moving photo album for a few scenes and expect us to dig our feet in. This story needed more time or a better director.
Lively and Law do their best to pick up the material, but in the end, you're left feeling like an unfinished meal was served to you. The final moments hint at something more, but if the buzz on this film and the lack of a press screening are any indications, we won't get to find out what the second chapter looks like. You'll have to stick to Burnell's second novel in the series.
Unlike "Atomic Blonde," which had style and expertly crafted fight scenes to aid its story, "The Rhythm Section" doesn't separate itself from the pack of revenge films, even ones led by women. Jennifer Garner's "Peppermint" was sloppy and even silly at times, but it had at the very least a one-track mind. It wanted to give you action and while it missed the mark, at least there was the resemblance of identity there. Lively's film feels incomplete and also not interesting enough.
It's OK to scale the field of a genre and give us something that may seem like an old friend, but you have to add something special to it. Think about making an omelet for something, but putting a certain unique spice into the dish, which gives it an original flavor. "The Rhythm Section," which is supposed to represent the inter-workings of your body coming together to shoot a gun accurately, lacks flavor.
Choose another film, such as Olivia Wilde's "A Vigilante." That film had a rhyme and reason. "The Rhythm Section" has some style, but no real reason to exist.