Over the past couple years, mainly off the back of the
now-legendary Mad Max: Fury Road, Charlize Theron has become the female action
icon that, honestly, we need right
now. I know that this might sound a bit reactionary after the pleasant success
of Wonder Woman, and especially in light of certain… comments that have been made
about it recently, but we don’t really have a lot of bankable female action heroes
right now. Not to say that they just don’t exist (hell, I’ve been singing
Scarlett Johansson’s praises for a while now) but I specify “bankable” because
money talks and we’re still in this weird position of hesitance in letting
these actors get their fair share. So, in light of another widely-popular
action reinvention in the form of the John Wick movies, Theron tapped Wick
co-director David Leitch to give her a fighting chance. Does that chance pay
off?
The plot: In the final days of the Cold War, a botched
transaction set up by MI6 and the CIA has resulted in a top-secret list of
field agents being unaccounted for, putting every field agent behind
enemy lines in danger. Allied agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron) is dispatched to
Berlin to retrieve the list before it reaches the hands of Satchel, a double
agent suspected of selling secrets to the Soviets. However, once she touches
down and makes contact with undercover MI6 agent Percival (James McAvoy), it
seems that her mission is about to get a whole lot rougher.
Even considering how impressed I was with Theron’s
performances in Fury Road and even Fate Of The Furious from earlier this year,
I am kind of floored by how good she is here. Personifying stone-cold
efficiency and wearing the more “hidden in plain sight” type of spy capering
like she was born to do it, Theron makes for a very exciting presence on
screen. Bonus points for giving us probably the best bisexual icon of the last
several years, all without falling into the promiscuity trap that a lot of
other depictions of bisexual women end up in. McAvoy is clearly having a lot of
fun with his character here, resulting in a very shifty and sly counterpoint to
Theron for most of the film. Toby Jones and John Goodman do alright in their
interrogatory roles, Marsan brings a touch of grounding to a film full of
bombast, and Roland Møller makes for an intimidating, if somewhat underused,
villainous foil.
After seeing how well John Wick co-director Chad Stahelski
did with that film’s sequel, it’s relieving that David Leitch is able to helm a
film on his own like this. The visuals squeeze in a bit of 80’s punk influence
(along with a few pieces of pop culture that could be classified as punk and
anti-authoritarian like Public Enemy), but it’s mainly the colour palette that
is the most consistently striking here. It carries the same tricks Leitch
brought to Wick’s debut, using distinct colours to separate each locale and
almost giving them each a different character to play within the story. Hell,
there’s even a location that would fit right at home in the world of the
Continental with the shop of Til Schweiger’s Watchmaker.
However, the main
colour that sticks out is how white this film looks. The white landscape of the
Berlin streets, the snow, the cold; fitting that a film set at the tail-end of
the Cold War would look as icy as this. By essentially using blinding white
negative space as the thread that connects the more colourful areas together
(the gold sheen of the Watchmaker’s shop, the burning red to back Lorraine
“making contact” with Sofia Boutella’s Delphine, the dusk blue of Lorraine’s
home), it gives the feel of something Frank Miller would have drawn in his
prime. Again, fitting since this is adapted from a graphic novel.
But enough about the pretty colours; what about the fighting?
Well, I’ll put it this way: Deadpool 2 is in very, very good hands because this has some seriously impressive action
beats. I don’t want to keep making references to it but, in its own way, this
film is a contrast to John Wick; mainly, the mindset of the main character that
we see through their fighting style. John had time to prepare and often read
his enemies’ movements to make his next attack. Lorraine, in her own words, was
thrown into the hornet’s nest; from the instant she touched down, she’s kept in
the dark by those around her. She has to think on her feet and get creative.
Basically, Wick worked with his enemies while Lorraine works with her
environment. Rope, shoes, a set of keys, a cupboard door, a turntable; if it
can do some damage, she uses it in the fight and it is incredibly satisfying.
Then
we get into the main action set piece of the film, where the majority of the
damage gets done, and my brain goes kablooey. While the fighting itself is
quite thrilling, and Theron definitely sells every punch and bruise she gives
and gets in return, the entire scene is done in one take. One-take action
scenes aren’t exactly the easiest things to do, not the least of which because
it can often make the choreography a little too
obvious. But here, the fact that it’s all in real-time makes the impending
danger and every blow that connects have that much more impact. If it seems
weird that I’m highlighting this moment so much, understand that this is in the
running for the single best fight scene of any film I’ve covered so far. Like I
said, very good hands.
It feels weird to be talking about the actual visuals of a
film for this long; I should get into the writing at some point, right? Well,
here’s where we get a slight dip in quality. Last time I checked in with writer
Kurt Johnstad, it was with the deliriously inept 300: Rise Of An Empire. Now,
thankfully, Johnstad is working with a finished comic book to adapt from this
time around, but I still wouldn’t call it the best thing ever. Espionage
stories set during the Cold War have both the most potential for
paranoia-driven antics, given the historical circumstances of said war, and
also have been somewhat done to death like any other setting. Admittedly, the
film does play around with the usual
double and even triple-crossing nature of spy work, right down to being weirdly
up-front about certain characters and how much they should be trusted.
However,
it feels like some potentially neat ideas got lost in the shuffle somewhere.
There’s hints of deeper purpose behind what we are seeing, like how undercover
work can make an agent blur the line between their allies and their enemies and
the emotional disconnection that that entails, but it never seems to go
anywhere. To make matters worse, by the time we get to the obligatory shock
ending reveal, the film employs so many twists as to lost coherency entirely.
It’s still held together well through Theron and McAvoy’s performances, but the
ultimate reason behind their characters’ actions feels unfortunately trivial.
Then again, this film is definitely far more about the style than the
substance, and in this case, one mostly compensates for the other.
All in all, while not exactly the most deft spy caper I’ve seen,
the visual chops combined with the impressive acting on display from Theron and
McAvoy result in a very fun action flick. Theron has proven that she can be an
action lead, and quite an adept one at that, and Leitch has proven that he can
helm a solid film on his own; get these people more work, for the love of all
things good.
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