THE RHYTHM SECTION (UK/US - 2020) Directed by Reed Morano. Written by Mark Burnell. Cast: Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Max Casella, Geoff Bell, Raza Jaffrey, Richard Brake, Nasser Memarzia, Amira Ghazalla, Tawfeek Barhom. (R, 109 mins) One of the rare non-James Bond projects for Eon Productions (along with recent and little-seen titles like 2017's FILM STARS DON'T DIE IN LIVERPOOL and 2018's NANCY), THE RHYTHM SECTION would appear to be an attempt by producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson (the daughter and stepson of Eon co-founder Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli) to start another franchise in the 007 vein, this one based on the initial 1999 entry in author Mark Burnell's series of "Stephanie Patrick" espionage novels. But this was a troubled production that started shooting in late 2017 and had to be suspended for six months after star Blake Lively suffered a serious hand injury while working on an action sequence. A disastrous test screening in November 2018 led to a round of re-editing and it was bumped from February 2019 to November 2019, then again to the multiplex netherworld of January 2020, where the $50 million film grossed just under $3 million, giving it the dubious distinction of having the worst-ever opening weekend for a movie bowing on more than 3000 screens. Though it's based on a novel that's over two decades old, it can't help but feel a little familiar after similar ground was recently covered in ATOMIC BLONDE, RED SPARROW, and Luc Besson's ANNA, not to mention Besson's 1990 classic LA FEMME NIKITA, the template for this sort of thing.
This probably shouldn't have opened that wide, and there's been some chatter that Eon, Lively, and cinematographer-turned-director Reed Morano (who won an Emmy for helming the debut episode of THE HANDMAID'S TALE) never could get on the same page in terms of exactly what THE RHYTHM SECTION should be--a commercial action movie or a grim, downbeat revenge thriller--and that indecisiveness is apparent in the released film. It feels like big chunks of it are missing (indeed, Morano said in an interview that she ended up cutting co-star Daniel Mays' entire performance--he's still credited on the IMDb page, along with several others who are no longer in the movie) and it's been whittled down to the bare bones. Logic is tossed out the window almost immediately, and Lively's Stephanie Patrick is put in situations that might fly in a comic-book style scenario like LA FEMME NIKITA or ATOMIC BLONDE but not in something that starts gravely serious and involves the aftermath of a terrorist attack. The globetrotting story opens in Tangier as Stephanie is about to take out her latest target, but then cuts back to eight months earlier, when she was calling herself "Lisa," and was a junkie working in a skeezy brothel in London. Freelance journalist Keith Proctor (Raza Jaffrey) has discovered her true identity and knows her past and what sent her on this path of self-destruction: her mother, father, sister, and brother were killed in a plane crash three years earlier in what was officially declared "mechanical failure." But that was a cover-up and Proctor knows the truth: a bomb took it down, a grandiose radical Islam message sent as part of a plot to assassinate one passenger: the anti-terrorism activist son of wealthy Suleiman Kaif (Nasser Memarzia), who suspected the official story was bullshit and has been funding Proctor's secret investigation.
Proctor lets Stephanie crash at his flat, where she researches all of his findings while he's out and sees the bomb maker was a currently-enrolled college student named Mohamed Reza (Tawfeek Barhom). She buys a gun (along with some heroin), goes to the university, looks around for a few seconds, finds him in the student union and stares him down, but she's unable to pull the trigger. A spooked Reza and his two associates walk off with her backpack, and by the time she gets back to Proctor's flat, his research is destroyed and he's lying on the bathroom floor with a bullet in his head. After a quick glance at Google Maps on her phone, she manages to pinpoint the exact location of "B" (Jude Law), the mysterious ex-MI6 agent who's been doing the intel for Proctor. She travels by bus and then hoofs it to B's isolated cottage in the middle of Scottish nowhere, where he's been living off the grid since a botched operation got him bounced from the agency. But he's not so off the grid that he doesn't already know that she foolishly confronted Reza and that Proctor is dead as a result. At this point, THE RHYTHM SECTION turns into an espionage and counter-terrorism KILL BILL, with B as a scowling Pai Mei putting Stephanie through a course of tough-love training after some quick FRENCH CONNECTION II detoxing, after which she's ready to be an assassin once she finds her "rhythm section," as B calls it, explaining "Your heart is the drums, your breathing is the bass." This training involves a few laps around the hills, a swim across an ice-cold lake, firing a couple of shots at a practice target and at B while he wears a bulletproof vest, and an impromptu brawl in B's kitchen, after which she knees him in the balls and asks him if wants some tea.
THE RHYTHM SECTION cuts a lot of corners, especially once B informs her that Reza was employed by an elusive terrorist mastermind known as "U-17," and puts her in touch with Marc Serra (Sterling K. Brown), an ex-CIA agent-turned-international assassination broker. Serra believes she's a presumed-dead freelance German hit woman named Petra Reuter, and he has the names of all the people even tangentially-connected to the airplane bombing, sending "Petra" everywhere from Madrid to Tangier to NYC to Marseilles to wipe them all out. The ultimate target is the mysterious "U-17," whose surprise reveal is anything but. It's never plausible for one second that Stephanie can handle herself in this dangerous world, or why Proctor would leave a sketchy, erratically-behaving drug addict in his flat all day while he's out working, even after he catches her taking money from his wallet. It only happens because there's no movie he doesn't leave her alone to raid his files. Also, every time she shows up somewhere, she manages to already be in someone's residence, leaving it a mystery as to how she acquired the necessary stealth skills to break into everything from Kaif's presumably heavily-guarded palace (she's just already there in his dining room) to the second-story Tangier apartment of Lehmans (Richard Brake), the U-17 associate who planted the bomb on the plane, and who's got guys standing outside at the building's only entrance. The film moves fast enough that it hopes you don't ask any questions like this, or like why, in one phone call to B, Stephanie calls him "Boyd," when she--and we--have never been informed of his real name, which he must've told her in a scene that's been cut. There are some OK action sequences, and Morano does pull off a decent CHILDREN OF MEN-style car chase with a bunch of whip-pans to hide the edit points in the "single take" illusion. At the end of the day--and yes, the door is left open for a sequel that's all but certain to never happen unless this ends up being a surprise blockbuster in the Asian market--all THE RHYTHM SECTION really has going for it is a convincingly gritty and extremely committed performance by Lively, who gives it exponentially more than she'll ever get in return, and she had the scrapes, bruises, and broken bones to prove it. There's even three medical professionals credited in the end credits crawl as "Ms. Lively's injury physiotherapists."
CAFE SOCIETY (US - 2016) Written and directed by Woody Allen. Cast: Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively, Kristen Stewart, Jeannie Berlin, Parker Posey, Corey Stoll, Ken Stott, Sari Lennick, Stephen Kunken, Sheryl Lee, Paul Schneider, Anna Camp, Douglas McGrath, Tony Sirico, Richard Portnow, voice of Woody Allen. (PG-13, 96 mins)
CAFE SOCIETY is the annual Woody Allen obligation, 2016 edition, and it's his strongest work since he directed Cate Blanchett to an Oscar in 2013's BLUE JASMINE. Latter-day Allen, particularly in this decade, is wildly inconsistent, ranging from his biggest commercial success in decades with 2011's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS to two of his career worsts with 2012's completely phoned-in TO ROME WITH LOVE and 2015's embarrassing IRRATIONAL MAN. Mainly, late-period Woody consists of mildly enjoyable trifles that are forgotten soon after watching. His 47th film as a director in 47 years (1981 was the last year he took off), CAFE SOCIETY isn't top-tier Allen by any means, but it's better than a lot of what he's done in the last ten or so years, exhibiting a bit more ambition and depth to go along with the requisite Windsor font-opening credits set to a scratchy jazz standard (most of the compositions are new recordings by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks). Working for the first time with the great Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (LAST TANGO IN PARIS, APOCALYPSE NOW, THE LAST EMPEROR), Allen achieves one of his best-looking films with the digitally-shot CAFE SOCIETY, which has a lot of laughs but is never played too broadly, with a melancholy streak that grows more apparent as it goes on.
In late 1930s Hollywood, idealistic young Woody surrogate (Allen himself narrates the film, and the 80-year-old legend's voice is starting to sound a little frail) Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) arrives from the Bronx, hoping to land a job with his uncle Phil Stern (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent-to-the-stars. A relentless name-dropper ("I'm expecting a call from Ginger Rogers," he says to anyone who will listen at a posh party), Stern wheels and deals and can barely make the time for his nephew, but he does get him some gofer work delivering messages and driving people around. Bobby eventually works his way up to script reader for a big studio and falls head over heels for Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), one of Phil's secretaries. Vonnie is flattered by Bobby's attention, but she's already in a relationship. Unbeknownst to all parties--initially--Vonnie's boyfriend is the much-older Phil, who's ready to leave Karen (Sheryl Lee), his wife of 25 years. When Phil decides he can't break his wife's heart, Vonnie and Bobby become a couple and it isn't long before they all realize their connection, and Phil finally walks out on his wife, insisting he'll kill himself if he can't be with Vonnie.
This plotline takes up most of the first hour of CAFE SOCIETY before Allen does a bit of a time jump in which Bobby has left Hollywood and has moved back to NYC, working as a manager at a swanky club owned by his older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a mobster gaining notoriety in the city. We see a vastly different Bobby from the shy, nebbishy, Woody-type we saw in Hollywood. He's cool, confidant, and a player. Allen does some clever misdirection here with the presentation of this "new" Bobby, almost as if a chunk of the movie was missing. And just when you're thinking this change in Eisenberg's performance seems forced and lacking in credibility, that's because it is. When the Hollywood past comes blithely strolling into his brother's Manhattan nightclub, that facade immediately vanishes and Bobby is Bobby again: awkward, hesitant, unable to look someone in the eye. The only difference is that it's now accompanied by a palpable anger. Eisenberg has done some great work (THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, THE SOCIAL NETWORK), but when he gets too "Eisenberg"-ish, he can be an acquired taste (his dreadful performance in BATMAN V SUPERMAN is a perfect example). His Allen impression in the first half is among the better ones Woody's commissioned for his films (remember Kenneth Branagh's cringe-inducing Woody in CELEBRITY?), but the actor is able to build the Bobby character using the Allen persona as a starting point, and the abrupt switch from man-about-town Bobby to the real Bobby is some of the most convincing work Eisenberg's ever done. This is his third pairing with Stewart, after ADVENTURELAND and AMERICAN ULTRA, and they really click here, as do Eisenberg and Blake Lively, who turns up in the second half of the film as a new object of Bobby's affections. Jeannie Berlin steals every scene she's in as Bobby's mother, taking the "harping Jewish matriarch" stereotype and running with it, along with Ken Stott as Bobby's grumbling father, who's always complaining about his brother-in-law Phil ("You don't just walk out on your wife because a newer one comes along" he tells his wife, adding "You're not winning any beauty contests, but I stuck with you!"). CAFE SOCIETY is as thematically and stylistically formulaic as almost every other Allen film, but there's a little more substance to this one than he's demonstrated in his more recent offerings. Judging from the pattern, Woody's 2017 film should be a disappointment, but in the meantime, CAFE SOCIETY shows the legendary filmmaker in pretty solid form.
THE SHALLOWS (US - 2016) Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Written by Anthony Jaswinski. Cast: Blake Lively, Oscar Jaenada, Brett Cullen, Sedona Legge, Angelo Josue Lozano Corzo, Jose Manuel Trujillo Salas. (PG-13, 86 mins) THE SHALLOWS doesn't give JAWS any cause for concern about losing its place as the greatest shark movie ever, but it gets the job done as mindless summer entertainment and the kind of relatively low-budget film ($17 million--pocket change by today's industry standards) that can quietly become a very profitable sleeper hit. It's handled in the best B-movie fashion by director Jaume Collet-Serra, who's become a reliable genre craftsman in the last several years with 2009's underrated and insane ORPHAN, and a pair of enjoyable Liam Neeson vehicles with 2011's Hitchcockian UNKNOWN and 2014's NON-STOP. Keeping the film lean and fast-moving (the closing credits start just shy of the 80-minute mark), Collet-Serra and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski (the terrible VANISHING ON 7TH STREET) plow through the exposition as quickly as possible and get to the heart of the surfer vs. shark story.
Still mourning her mother's death from cancer and seeking some kind of closure, med school dropout Nancy (Blake Lively) is ditched by her hard-partying friend and opts to go alone to an isolated Mexican beach that her mother visited while pregnant with her. An experienced surfer, Nancy rides some waves, enjoys the scenery, and briefly chats with a pair of nice locals who soon head back to the shore. Of course, that's just about the time Nancy is bitten and dragged under the water. She gets free, climbing onto a nearby decomposing whale carcass floating in the water. The shark, a great white, rams the carcass, throwing her off and sending her swimming for a nearby rock formation sticking out of the water. From there, it's Nancy vs. the great white, one trying to outsmart the other as Nancy fashions a tourniquet from her wet suit to stop the profuse bleeding from the bite on her leg (a great excuse for Collet-Serra to show off Lively in the skimpiest swimwear this side of Jacqueline Bisset in THE DEEP, at least until the gangrene makeup gets applied), which she holds together using her earrings as makeshift stitching. She finds an unlikely sidekick in an injured seagull she dubs "Steven Seagull." A few other characters wander into the water despite Nancy screaming "Shark!" and of course, they usually end up as dinner. As the tide comes in, Nancy needs to get off the rock as the persistent shark just endlessly circles her, almost sending Nancy a message that it's got nowhere else to be and she's got nowhere to hide.
THE SHALLOWS is a high-end junk movie that knows it's a junk movie. Lively makes a strong and believable heroine and for the most part, the CGI effects are pretty good (the shark is much more convincing here than the technology allowed in, say, 1999's DEEP BLUE SEA, a wild and fun shark flick completely undone by primitive CGI work that was unconvincing then and simply embarrassing now). Structurally similar to OPEN WATER, THE SHALLOWS is a lot prettier to look at, not just with Lively but with some crystal clear blue ocean off the coast of Queensland, filling in for Mexico. There isn't much depth and there isn't whole lot to say with this--it's a classic case of "It is what it is," and it works. It's not trying to be another JAWS, though it certainly acknowledges its influence, from the always-unnerving shots of the shark fin protruding from the water to giving Lively her own Roy Scheider last word when she finally gets the shark where she wants it. However, it's a sign of the times that the comparative gentlemanly elegance of "Smile, you son of a bitch!" has given way to the more blunt and verbally economical "Fuck you!" but I suppose it's an appropriate farewell.
