“I didn’t just want to play a girly spy who depends on her flirty ways,” Charlize Theron told W Magazine. Mission accomplished. Based on the wild ‘n woolly graphic novel “The Coldest City” by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart “Atomic Blonde” is a Cold War thriller that sees Theron dropkick Daniel Craig or Matt Damon out of the space they’ve occupied as film’s go-to super spies.
Set in 1989, just days before the fall of the Berlin wall, the film starts with the KGB assassination of an undercover MI6 operative in East Berlin. Theron plays Agent Lorraine Broughton, a high-ranking MI6 spy sent to the communist side of the wall to retrieve a dossier containing the names of other vulnerable British intelligence assets. “It’s an atomic bomb of information that could set the Cold War back 40 years!”
Toby Jones and John Goodman as MI6 and CIA head honchos respectively urge her not to trust anyone but she sparks up a personal and professional relationship with an inexperienced French agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella). Because everybody wants the dossier she is teamed with shady Berlin station chief David Percival (James McAvoy)—a “feral” man who moonlights selling bootlegged Jack Daniels to tourists—to beat the US, UK, USSR and France to the punch. How? By folding, spindling, mutilating, punching, kicking and head butting. There’s death by cork screw, fist and bullet and everything in between in some of the most dynamic fight scenes we’re likely to see on screen this year (and that includes “John Wick 2).
The trailers make “Atomic Bomb” look like wall-to-wall action. It isn’t. It’s a cold war spy movie with intermittent wild and woolly fisticuffs. And that’s OK. The fight scenes definite highlights and get the pulse racing but to be truly effective all movies must have hills and valleys.
If it was all action it would be like a Jason Statham movie. All talking it would be “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” As it is it hits the sweet spot between the two.
It’s a stylish film with visceral action scenes connected by an original cold war story, compelling characters and German versions of 80s pop hits.
This isn’t a Michael Bay style spectacular, it’s up-close-and-personal bare-knuckled warfare. Theron and her victims grunt and groan as fists hits faces and all manner of mayhem is unleashed. One particularly intense fight scene mixes and matches the above-mentioned grunts and groans with the catchy pop of George Michaels’ “Father Figure.” An even more effective sequence gets rid of the music completely.
The tour de force six-minute fight scene looks like a one-shot wonder. It’s hard to believe there isn’t some trickery involved but the sequence is dazzling nonetheless.
As Broughton, Theron is not a superhero. She comes out on top of most fights but emerges bruised and battered, which lends an air of unpredictability to the =storytelling.
“Atomic Blonde” is a violent, arty spy flick that doesn’t just open the door for Charlize Theron to create an effective spy franchise; it kicks it off its hinges.
This weekend one of the most multipurpose and enduring movie stars of the past 30 years returns to the screen. Kevin Spacey? No.
Daniel Day-Lewis? Na’ah. Gary Oldman? Nyet. It’s Keanu Reeves.
Wait! Isn’t he the guy critics love to hate? That Reelviews said was, “an actor of exceptionally limited scope” just as the Daily Mail called his performance in Constantine an “impersonation of a sleep-walking plank”?
Yes, one in the same. He’s The Matrix’s Neo, the Ted of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Point Break’s Johnny Utah.
This weekend he’s the title character in John Wick: Chapter 2, a down-and-dirty noir and follow up to the original 2014 hit.
The actor’s latest incarnation represents another reinvention in a career spent keeping audiences guessing. He’s gone on existential journeys, wooed Diane Keaton and played a peaceful extraterrestrial ambassador but Wicks is something else again.
The Wick movies are set in an alternative world of assassins where hit men and women are paid in special coins, stay in exclusive hotels — with killer views no doubt — and speak in a strangely formal way.
They see themselves as professionals with a civilized code of conduct… except that there is nothing civilized about the work they do. In the first film Wick was an assassin so tough he didn’t bother to take off his gore-soaked shirt when beginning his bloody quest for vengeance.
John Wick, the movies and the character are blunt, über macho instruments, brought to life by Reeves in a performance that cripples the argument Today.com made that he is simply a “reciter of dialogue.” First of all there is very little dialogue.
The opening 15 minutes of the first film is essentially a silent movie kept interesting by Reeves’s action hero charisma.
Unlike Meryl Streep he can’t do accents and he doesn’t have the range of some of his former co-stars like Oldman but what he does have is presence.
At his best Keanu understands how to be on screen. Author Bret Easton Ellis said that Reeves “is always hypnotic to watch,” and what is a movie star if not someone you can’t take your eyes off?
The Wick movies cap a busy and unpredictable time for the actor. After Speed and The Matrix he could have stuck to action films and made a career running, jumping and kicking people. Instead he diversified, jumping from romances like Sweet November to crime dramas like The Watcher to The Replacements, a sports comedy.
From studio movies to indies he is unpredictable in his choices, defying expectations. Take his erotic horror thriller Knock Knock for instance. He plays a man held captive in his own home by three female home invaders. It’s not a remarkable movie — I called it “deeply unpleasant” in my review — but what makes it interesting is Keanu’s character’s complete inability to protect himself. Most A-listers wouldn’t allow themselves to be portrayed as such easy prey, but Keanu relishes the chance to upend our view of him.
For sure Reeves has made some bad movies and even been bad in some movies but that sometimes happens when actors don’t play by the rules.
In John Wick, the character not the incredibly violent movies that bear his name, Keanu Reeves has found the pure essence of, for lack of a better word, Keanuness. Reeves has never been the most expressive actor, his appeal is physical and metaphysical. He can run, jump, shoot and punch with the best of them—that’s the physical part—but at the crux of his performances is a certain otherworldliness that makes him seem slightly detached from it all. He found the right balance in “the Matrix” and again in “John Wick: Chapter 2.”
The Wick movies are set an alternative world of assassins where hit men and women are paid in special coins, stay in exclusive hotels—with killer views no doubt—and speak in a strangely formal way. They see themselves as professionals with a civilized code of conduct… except that there is nothing civilized about the work they do. In the first film Wick was an assassin so tough he didn’t bother to take off his gore-soaked shirt when beginning his bloody quest for vengeance.
The new film picks up shortly after the events of the first. Wick wants a simpler life, away from the violence that has been his business. His retirement plan is disrupted when a former colleague, Santino (Riccardo Scamarcio), asks a favour. Actually, it’s more than a favour, it’s a marker, a promise to repay a debt, and Santino takes it very seriously. Santino’s request is an insidious one; kill my sister so I can take her place on the crime High Table.
“I’m not that guy anymore,” says John. “You are always that guy,” sneers Santino.
Rebuffed, Santino blows up John’s house. To put an end to the impending war Wick agrees to the job. His home a smoldering pile of ash, Wick re-enters his old world. A visit to the gun sommelier—“Can you suggest something big and bold for the end of the night?” he asks.—to a tailor who makes suits lined with tactical fabric and he is ready to square his debt.
(MILD SPOILER) Wick’s plan to return to a quiet life after the job is thwarted by a single phone call. “What kind of man would I be if I didn’t avenge my sister’s murder?” asks Santino. Cue a showdown with bad people with a seemingly endless amount of henchmen for John Wick to kill.
“John Wicks” created a wild world for its characters to inhabit that is unlike anything that came before. The second visit is almost as engaging. Much humour is found between the gunfights as these ruthless killers behave in a courtly way when not trying to bash one another’s brains out. It’s funny, but know this, it also very violent. Wick is a sentimental guy—this whole journey began when someone did something terrible to his beloved dog—but that doesn’t stop him from offing upwards of 140 people in the two hour running time. Much of the violence is goofy but tinged with hardcore Old Testament wrath.
As the man so mysterious he doesn’t even give his new dog a name, Reeves is in his element. It’s pure Keanu, a physical performance with very little dialogue. Think of him as a silent movie action star, an actor who transcends dialogue with sheer charisma. Like him or not, the guy understands how to be on camera, especially when he’s in motion, causing carnage.
Populating Wick’s world are a host of colourful characters brought to vivid life by Laurence Fishburne as the underworld boss of lower Manhattan, Ian McShane as Winston, the man who enforces the rules in the assassin’s twisted world, Common as a gin sipping security boss and Ruby Rose as a deadly and deaf killer.
As a sequel “John Wick: Chapter 2” hits all the right notes. It’s a tad too long but fans of the original will be reminded of why they fell in love with John Wick in the first place.
“I didn’t just want to play a girly spy who depends on her flirty ways,” Charlize Theron told W Magazine. Mission accomplished. Based on the wild ‘n woolly graphic novel “The Coldest City” by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart “Atomic Blonde” is a Cold War thriller that sees Theron dropkick Daniel Craig or Matt Damon out of the space they’ve occupied as film’s go-to super spies.
