A baffling mess of a film, The Rhythm Section fails to tell a coherent story just as it fails to make itself entertaining. Disjointed and confused, the film lurches uncomfortably between set pieces that are only held together by brief moments of solid cinematography and a dedicated, if lackluster, performance from Blake Lively.
Stephanie (Lively) works as a prostitute in London and is addicted to drugs. Her family died in a plane crash three years ago, but one day a journalist shows up telling her the government covered up that the crash was a terrorist attack. She doesn't believe him -- or doesn't want to -- until she sees his research and decides to kill the bomb-maker herself. She approaches him at his university but cannot bring herself to kill him. She discovers soon after that her journalist friend has been murdered, and uses his notes to locate his source, codenamed B. B (a buff AF Jude Law) is a former MI6 agent who gruffly trains her to bring justice to the terrorists responsible for the crash.
This is all fairly straightforward, even if it's all a rather dull, rote affair. We've seen it before, and we've seen it better. This is gloomy, somber work that takes itself far too seriously for its own good. Lively is committed to looking really awful (which is an amazing feat in itself), and her sunken eyes, bruised skin, and tousled hair pair well -- which is to say, really badly -- with the often unfocused, handheld camera that obsessively sticks close to her face in unflattering ways. We feel as hungover or intoxicated as she often is, which doesn't work well in this kind of complicated spy-esque story of names and places and hidden intrigue.
But once she meets B, things start to really derail. Time jumps with no clear markers, and so in one moment she's incapable of jogging but in the next she is apparently hiking miles around a Scottish loch. One moment she's getting her back beaten and is unable to stand, while in the next she's still getting beaten up but knows how to black and toss her own punch. B deems her ready after the excruciating ordeal of swimming across the loch (which makes no logical sense in context), and he sends her on her first mission: convince an information broker in Spain to help identify the terrorist who organized the airplane bombing. But the broker is hesitant, played by an inscrutable Sterling K. Brown. He sends her on a mission to a wealthy man to get funding, but he wants nothing to do with it all; his wife, whose son was also killed on the plane, will help if Stephanie kills a gangster in Tangier who apparently has something to do with the attack.
This is just the beginning of the mess, as Stephanie is forced into increasingly dangerous situations to spy or kill people that are suggested to have something vague to do with the airplane bombing. Precious little is explained, and my patience with Stephanie wore out quickly for two reasons. One, she allows herself to be constantly directed by men as to her next steps. Two, she's essentially incompetent as either a spy or assassin. She often fails at fighting when it matters most, and until the very end of the film she can't even kill her bounties. She allows one man to suffocate to death and nearly has a panic attack afterward; she cannot seduce another man in order to kill him, but still manages to get a knife on his throat before chickening out. You wanted this, sister, so own it!
In a way, it's interesting and even kind of cool to be following a reluctant assassin who scrapes along without actually doing anything cool. But frankly it doesn't make for good cinema. It doesn't really make sense that B doesn't just do the work himself; at one point, he even sets a car bomb to explode, proving he is clearly capable of the work he needs done. Why does he need Stephanie? And could he not tell that she just isn't capable of this kind of violence? How long did it take him to train her, anyway? He clearly blames himself for the bombing: in a ridiculously complex turn of events, we learn quickly and suddenly that he killed an assassin (a woman named Petra) who killed his wife, and was subsequently fired from MI6 because Petra had information on the terrorist who organized the bombing. Honestly...what? The best two scenes, in my opinion, are long takes by cinematographer Sean Bobbitt: one is a fistfight between Lively and Law in his kitchen, and the other is Lively driving to her escape through Tangier while her bounty's guards close in on her. But these scenes aren't awesome bits of action a la Atomic Blonde; they show her ineptitude and ability to keep taking hit after hit.
It gets worse, and at one point Stephanie gets in a weird sexual relationship with broker before finding the bomber kid (again?) in France and foils his random bus attack. Then, without a single bit of reliable or accessible explanation, she returns to the broker and kills him, understanding suddenly from B that her lover is the terrorist mastermind. So, in the end, nothing really matters in terms of plot or even character, apart from the two leads. The whole exercise is a masturbatory mess of violent impulses mostly aimed at a woman who demonstrates time and again that she doesn't have what it takes to live in this world of crime.
Plus the soundtrack is just weird.
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