Another year and another film tying to replicate an already overdone Femme Fatale formula. “The Rhythm Section” certainly does that, with something we’ve already seen plenty of times with an entire first act that is difficult to sit through and manages to wear you out before the film finds it’s stride.
Blake Lively, stars with a bad haircut and English accent, as Stephanie Patrick, a young woman who’s life is thrown into the gutter after her family dies in a plane explosion. When she’s recruited out of nowhere to take down the terror cell responsible, she has to transform herself from a drug addicted prostitute into an international killing machine.
The problem here is the pacing. For the first half hour of the movie, we’re still trying to figure out where all of this misery is headed and by the time Jude Law and Sterling K. Brown (The Story of Us) show up and the action kicks in, we’re already tired from the wait. Lively can’t push this bad character into a place where we can actually care what happens to her and really there were other times when I was just bored.
If I have to pick out some bright spots, director Reed Morano gives us a good action sequence just over half way through the movie, and Hans Zimmer is right on with the film’s score.
Otherwise, it would be best to just bypass “The Rhythm Section” altogether.
“The Rhythm Section”
Grade: D
Rated: R
Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes.
