Black Gate

I’ve been swamped by movies since the 2017 Fantasia International Film Festival began, and that’s left me with no time to write about the things I’ve seen. It looks like those reviews will start coming next week, after the festival ends. But on Wednesday I saw a movie that’s getting a wide release this weekend, and on the off chance what I have to say might be useful to anybody trying to plan their weekend, I thought I’d abandon my usual diary format to say a few words about Atomic Blonde.

The movie’s officially the directorial debut of longtime stunt coordinator David Leitch, who also directed some of the scenes in John Wick. He’s working here with a script from Kurt Johnstad, who wrote (among other things) the screenplays for 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire. This is another comic adaptation, based on The Coldest City, a 180-page graphic novel written by Antony Johnston, drawn by Sam Hart, and published in 2012 by Oni Press; a prequel, Dead of Winter, came out last year with art by Steven Perkins.

Atomic Blonde is set in November, 1989, as MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) is sent to Berlin to get an East German defector across to the West, and recover a list of double agents. She also has to investigate the recent murder of another British agent, and work out how much she can trust the British station chief in Berlin, the manic David Percival (James McAvoy). This isn’t an espionage thriller, though, not really. This is an action film, and the violence starts early and recurs often as Broughton goes about her mission. Does the whole thing work?

Yes and no. I found the action scenes were strong and inventive. The clear highlight is an extended long-take fight scene in the middle of the movie that moves from brutal to comic and back again. Like a lot of the fights, there’s an engaging mix of martial-arts fluidity, improvised weapons, gunplay, and unexpected reversals. Punches and kicks land with satisfying weight, if not consequence. Theron’s Broughton wears more and more of the marks of her combats as the film goes along, but these bruises and scars merely nod faintly toward reality. This is an action movie, and there’s a slickness to the action that keeps it engaging, if rarely at the level of the one-take set-piece. You don’t care about the plausibility of Theron fighting in high heels because she’s visually coded as very nearly a super-hero: always in immaculate black-and-white costumes (rarely grey in non-fighting sequences), always lit and framed as the larger-than-life lead.

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Leaflets fall from the sky on the streets of an idyllic village in France. Soldiers fetch them from the ground as the papers collide, their ominous fluttering booming in your ears.

We follow a boy, clad in the regimental coat of a British soldier. In his eyes, we bear witness to the hardened resolve to survive. He collects the leaflets with his fellow soldiers, scrutinizing them with a benign detachment.

When bombs rip through the sky, the boy tears into a sprint. Leaflets go flying in an eerie flurry of white. He finds refuge among a barrier of sandbags, only to shoot from the post the moment another torrent of bombs descends. In the next moment, he clambers past an obstacle and reenters the place of battle. There, he confronts the staggering sight of his fellow countrymen, awaiting their departure on the shore.

Thus begins Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s magisterial account of a monumental event in World War II. In many ways, the film owes its resonance to Tommy, played by Fionn Whitehead, whom we first see comprehending the silent herald of death. He demands your attention with his earnestness to scrape through the onslaught of terror with the skin on his bones and the heart jackhammering in his ribs.

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