ATOMIC BLONDE Has More Fun

I like imagining Charlize Theron saw 2014’s slick, cool, expertly choreographed Keanu Reeves actioner John Wick and thought to herself, “I gotta get me one of these.” And get it she did. From that film’s stuntman co-director David Leitch comes Atomic Blonde, a stylish, knotty last-dregs-of-the-Cold-War thriller set against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall’s fall. German unrest is at a head, and into this mess strides Theron as an ice-cold, hyper-competent, platinum blonde secret agent who must plunge ahead into one last mission tangled up in Stasi, Soviet, French, British, and American spies fighting (and double-triple-quadruple-crossing each other) over a MacGuffin. There’s a potential defector and a list of undercover identities in the mix, and all the combatants want them for one reason or another. But is there any doubt it’s Theron who will emerge victorious? She has all the right moves. The movie is told largely in flashback. It opens with Theron’s pulling her naked body out of an ice bath, showing painful cuts and bruises dappling her skin. After dressing for her day, she smolders into a debriefing room where Toby Jones and John Goodman eye her suspiciously and ask her to explain what went down in Berlin. She proceeds to spin the tale – of seduction, sabotage, secrets, and surveillance accounting for each and every injury. It’s hard to keep track of the ins and outs of the byzantine plotting – at once pulp simple and complicated – but with Theron in the center of it all, our sympathies and source of awe are never in doubt.

Grooving on a frosted palate and the smooth New Wave cuts pulsating on the soundtrack, the film keeps its intoxicating placid cool. Leitch glides the proceedings easily through the complications of spycraft genre conventions – moles, listening devices, traitors, hookups – enumerated by the screenplay by Kurt Johnstad (300 and its superior sequel) from the comic book The Coldest City. It’s stock stuff, but elevated to pulpy pop art by its sleek exuberance, and by Theron’s fierce, believably outlandish performance – solid and steady, a human terminator who takes a beating and keeps going. Leitch has the good sense to center her in the telling and the frame, finding supreme entertainment even in the way she walks across a tarmac or slips into the back of a car. This is a woman who always knows exactly what she’s doing, how she’s carrying herself, and what to do to prepare to beat down any attackers. The variety of action – held in steady shots lovingly revealing the whole-body choreography from multiple combatants – is thrilling. She fights off two men from inside a speeding car armed only with a sharp red high heel. She grabs a length of garden hose to fend off assailants in a grubby apartment. In the film’s highlight, she goes up an elevator and down a staircase, in and out of a bunch of rooms along the way, punching, kicking, slapping, stabbing, and shooting a handful of formidable villains. By the time she and the last man standing are breathing heavy, bleeding from multiple wounds, and clutching throbbing muscles, staggering as they attempt to regain their balance, you’d think the fight is done. But there’s still a chase sequence to come.

Mostly a short and sweet genre riff done up in pleasing period burlesque and oozing casually ostentatious style in every frame, Atomic Blonde is committed to serving up memorable action beats. It takes what could be a hackneyed, played-out, half-comprehensible plot in more lugubrious, self-serious hands and just digs into its improbabilities as a clothesline for its visual tricks and exquisite action. Theron is the capital-S star, and she’s surrounded by dependable actors (James McAvoy, Eddie Marsan, Sofia Boutella, Bill Skarsgard) doing what they do best. It fills the downtime with enough eccentric flavoring without overpowering what Theron’s doing at center stage. Everyone’s just a piece of the puzzle – a cog in a conspiracy, obstacle to be run over, asset worth flipping or deceiving. Besides, it’s all about the sheer pleasure of the film’s posing and posturing. It’s in a gleaming pair of sunglasses, a shock of neon, a white trench coat, a car sailing backwards through a busy intersection, a seductive French photographer, a wily watch salesman, a wall standing ominously dangerous (for the last time) in the center of town. It’s in the thwack of a blow connecting, the snap of a sniper’s gun, the blast of pop from a car stereo, the crunch of boots in the snow. The movie’s pleasures are exactly this simple and surface and satisfying.

All's Well That Ends Well: THE WORLD'S END

With each film, from Shaun of the Dead to Hot Fuzz to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the increasingly brilliant director Edgar Wright has pushed his zippy, energetic pop art precision further. His overt genre exercises gain their momentum and their hilarity from the way he points his camera, frames the action, and edits away, often getting big laughs with nothing more than a perfectly timed cut or a sight gag of staging. His newest film is The World’s End and it may be his best film yet, as unexpectedly moving as it is an endlessly entertaining blast of fun.

It’s immediately obvious that we’re watching a Wright film. The unchecked personality in the breakneck pace, visual flourishes, and crisply energetic montage reveal that right away. But unlike his zombie and buddy cop satires and his graphic novel adaptation, this is a film that sets out to play it straight – for a while, at least. The World’s End is an often hilarious dramedy about aging, growing into maturity, and the arrested development of hanging onto the memory of old times to the detriment of making new ones, centering on a group of teenage friends who drifted apart and are brought back together in the midst of middle age in an attempt to recapture some youthful fun.

The man who brings them together again used to be the king of their group, the guy with the fun ideas, the outsized personality that everyone followed around. When they were 18, he led them on an attempted pub-crawl through their small hometown – 12 pubs in all. Needless to say, they didn’t finish, but sure had fun anyway. Now it’s over twenty years later, and he’s starting to realize that what he thought at the time was the best night of his life actually ended up being the best night of his life. Why’d he have to peak so early? Now he’s consumed by the need to relive the night and finish the crawl, a pint at every pub, right down to the twelfth and final stop that alluded them all those years ago: The World’s End.

In the briskly expositional and very funny opening sequences of the film, this down-on-his-luck guy (Simon Pegg) whirls his way back into the lives of his buddies, now businessmen (Eddie Marsan, Paddy Considine), realtors (Martin Freeman), and lawyers (Nick Frost). They don’t quite know what to make of their friend, still driving his old clunker, listening to his high school-era mix tapes, and eager to return to their hometown. “It’s so boring there,” one of them says. His response is quick on his tongue: “Yeah, because we’re not there!” Once there they find that the sleepy little town is exactly the same except very different. The film is built around the simple observation that returning to your hometown after some time away is an odd experience.

It’s not just the samey corporatized restaurant scene – “Stop Starbucksing us!” one character shouts – that seems odd. Sure, the old conspiracy theorist (David Bradley) is nursing his drink at his favorite pub and their old English teacher (Pierce Brosnan) is still hanging around. But the place seems smaller and less welcoming. Why, it’s as if no one even remembers this group of guys. They felt like they ran the place then, but not so anymore. Time moved on and moves on. Beginning their pub-crawl, the guys fall back into old patterns of patter at times, bristling at others. They’re stuck somewhere between reminiscing and forging new bonds after being apart for so long. Do they revert to the boys they were or get to know each other as the men they now are? The terrific ensemble maintains terrific chemistry, sparkling through each scene with a genuine sense of a mix of youthful camaraderie and middle-aged resignation. Pegg’s excellent performance – so squirrely and wounded – pulls them in a boyish direction. Most of the others aren’t so definitive, warm but professional, straining to put up with the man they used to call “friend.” The marvelously witty script (co-written by Wright and Pegg) bounces their personalities off the scenarios and each other in pleasing and telling patter.

These guys, as well as a welcome Rosamund Pike as an old friend who meets up with them, form a richly sympathetic and massively likable core around which just about anything could happen. Funny thing is, that’s precisely what happens. The World’s End so buoyantly and confidently skips off the tracks of its apparent genre and lands in another without missing a beat. I can’t wait to see it again, not just to get caught up in how hugely entertaining the whole thing is, but to marvel at how smoothly and seemingly effortlessly it makes its transitions. The setup is golden, and could easily have sustained a feature on its own, although it’d have been a significantly less overtly dazzling one. Where it goes from there is as wholly satisfying as it is unexpected. To that end, avoid the advertising for the film, which I was sad to discover gives up the whole premise. Not since The Truman Show has an ad campaign so thoroughly defanged a movie’s central potent surprises. If you go in knowing only that it’s a very funny character-based Edgar Wright film, you might get the mouth-agape goofy-grin reaction that I had. Better yet, you might be like the guy a few rows back from me who shouted “What!?” during one pivotal development.

What Wright and company have in store involves taking the film’s powerful subtext and exploding it outwards as stirring, exciting, wonderfully silly metaphor, as if John Carpenter directed The Big Chill as rewritten by Douglas Adams. But that’s not exactly true, is it? This is pure Wright all the way. It’s a film that descends into the kind of action-packed genre silliness so hugely entertaining and expertly choreographed that you wish more big crowd-pleasing films were so dedicated to genuine surprises, a sense of discovery, and twists that are at once unexpected and wild while still making sense in the context of richly developed characters. That sounds like an Edgar Wright film to me.

In a summer where so many movies seemed to drift towards an inevitable autopilot conclusion, it’s a relief to find a film that grows only more unpredictable and satisfying as it goes along. There’s a real sense of the joy of the movies in every frame. It’s a freewheeling film of banter and slapstick – equally giddy and skillful in execution – that never loses track of its generous and genuine heart. It’s an inventive, tricky movie, the biggest trick of which is how straightforward it all is when you think about it. The World’s End ends with an entirely unanticipated series of moments thrilling, gentle, and a little goofy, too. There’s a sense that, although these characters are no longer juvenile, it’s hardly the end of the world. 

Fairy Tale, Fractured: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Only the latest iteration of the fairy-tale-into-big-budget-spectacle trend that’s sweeping Hollywood, Snow White and the Huntsman hacks out an identity all its own. Unlike Mirror Mirror, a candy-colored family-friendly confection that Tarsem whipped up for release earlier this year, Huntsman is a darker, grimmer thing, drawing less inspiration from the safe, colorful comedy of children’s fantasy and more from the kind of dour, sweeping fantasy spectacle of the likes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or HBO’s Game of Thrones. The script by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini takes apart the old story of the evil queen and her fairest-of-them-all stepdaughter until all that’s left and recognizable is aspects of the tale’s iconography: the mirror, the poison apple, the dwarves. What the film does with them is sometimes surprising and ultimately satisfying. This is a handsome and effective spectacle.

The film starts with Ravenna (Charlize Theron), an evil witch, tricking a king into marrying her. On their honeymoon, she straddles him and plunges a dagger into his chest. She flips back on the bed, basking in her triumph as her army storms past unsuspecting guards to take over the castle. Her stepdaughter, Snow White, is promptly locked away, so as not to interfere with her rule. Years later, now grown, Snow (Kristen Stewart) gets a chance to escape and flees into the dark forest. The queen, her good looks and terrible magic ever reliant on sucking the youthful souls out of beautiful young women, has learned that the only way she can make her dark powers permanent is to eat Snow White’s heart. So she sends her right-hand man, who happens to be her creepy brother (Sam Spruell), and a strapping, alcoholic huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) to chase down the escaped girl.

When they find her, the huntsman takes sympathy on Snow White and, instead of helping the queen’s brother, decides to help her. Together they fight off the queen’s henchmen and flee through the woods, where they will meet all manner of creatures, both frightening and enchanting, on their way towards safety. But it’s not safety Snow wants. She wants her kingdom. On their journey, they meet many potential allies amongst the people living in fear of the evil queen, including a band of dwarves (great British actors Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, and Toby Jones shrunk down through movie magic) and a young man (Sam Claflin) who knew Snow in the years before her father’s death and who is now a talented archer. But even as they make their way through the wilderness, Ravenna glides through the castle, plotting her ultimate victory and flexing her supernatural muscles, transforming into a flock of inky ravens and commanding a phantom army made up of black shards.

This all sounds like the Snow White tale has been turned into just another epic-quest fantasy film with swooping shots of a band of allies trudging through picturesque landscapes. In some ways that’s exactly what it is, but what saves the film from becoming just an imitation is the intensity and earnestness with which commercial director Rupert Sanders, making an impressive feature film debut, stages the action. Like one of those grungy fantasies of the 1980s (I was thinking of Matthew Robbins’s Dragonslayer, but it at times put me in mind of Ron Howard’s Willow as well), Sanders makes his fantasy world muddy and convincingly worn-down. There’s a certain kind of realism to the striking visuals here that’s hugely rewarding. Dark magic has done a number on this ruined landscape and as our characters make their way through it, there’s a feeling of real melancholy. The effects – many are clearly elaborate, but convincing, CGI – are given space to breathe and consequentially often, especially in a mid-film respite in a mossy woodland oasis crawling with cute critters and a casual dusting of magical beings that reminded me of similar moments in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, have some real awe behind them. The pace of the picture stretches out, allowing time for Greig Fraser’s beautiful cinematography (he’s also done gorgeous work for Jane Campion and Matt Reeves) to truly soak in the sights and for the subtle work of the ensemble to provide real human emotion to the stakes of it all.

Less subtle is Theron’s villainous turn as the evil queen Ravenna. She’s icy and coldly sensual, submerging herself in a tub of milk in an effort to maintain her smooth skin between injections of young souls. She’s rotten to the core, given to howling out awful demands. But she, too, is fleshed out to the point where she’s also a bit of a tragic figure. Similarly, Stewart’s Snow White is no mere placid figure of beauty. She’s rough around the edges, with a steely determination in her eyes and a real fighting spirit within her. None of this is overwrought or heavily underlined, though, even as the plot’s ending is more or less predetermined. But the complicating of the female roles and the patriarchal assumptions of the original tale happens matter-of-factly. This is just the way the story unfolds this time. (I appreciated how it all ends, too. Without giving anything away, it ends without any kind of wedding-bells romantic conclusion, instead ending on a note of weary relief.) I would never have guessed that such a serious, dark, unsmiling yet heartfelt interpretation of Snow White would have been so gripping and involving. It’s quite lovely in the way it’s underplayed.

This is a big, thunderous fantasy epic that’s filled with excitement, incident and action, embellished with expensive effects, and yet it feels so downbeat, so patiently paced and unafraid of stillness and silence. It’s genuinely creepy, tense, and moving. And yet it’s never insistent or pressing; the cast is treating this material with utter seriousness and, though that can certainly backfire, here it helps that the material is so earnest and sensitively tuned. (It could be a bit more complicated, perhaps, but let’s not press our luck.) There’s a real respect to matters of life and death here. When a character is in danger or dies, there’s a real mournfulness in the way that’s presented. That is something all too rare in this age of easy computerized carnage and quick-cut climaxes wherein digital cannon fodder and background collateral damage is just a backdrop for superheroics. Rupert Sanders handles this big movie with such a striking eye for visuals and such surprising facility with tone and emotion that I suspect he has a big career ahead of him. The idea to take a well-worn tale and retell it with modern tools from a modern sensibility seems rather uninspired, but Sanders has made a film of real, satisfying imagination.