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.

Breakable: SPLIT

Split is a movie fractured between victims and victimizers. It has a trio of kidnapped girls trapped in a nondescript basement, cowering and terrified and unsure how to fight back and escape. It also follows the kidnapper, an imposing and intimidating man of few words who is also his own victim, as multiple personalities share his mind, some good and trying to push him to do the right thing, others bad, using his body for evil. They all fear The Beast. The movie awaits his arrival, a new, scary personality that will banish all the others and take the body for his own nefarious animalistic purposes. As an M. Night Shyamalan movie, it takes on a fractured quality as well. It’s somewhere between the expensive, expansive, gorgeously designed studio pictures of his early career – masterful thoughtful chillers like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village – and the nastier, scrappier B-movie he’s now making for Blumhouse, starting with found-footage lark The Visit. His movies are quiet, contemplative, and restrained. But now they’ve taken on a grotesque crowd-pleasing edge, this one taking the time occasionally to linger on young bodies in tight undergarments and bloody bites taken out of abdomens. But what joins these impulses is a patience, and a willingness to sit the majority of its runtime in a serious, overwhelming, portentous feeling of impending doom. Cutting between the basement, the man, his therapist, and flashbacks from the lead girl, each gathers its own sick pit of despair, and the only resolution for these damaged characters will be to embrace their damage, and make their pain an asset.

In this way, the unusually structured screenplay goes askew from the predictable, leaning away from simple dichotomies or the expected suspense. It’s not so much about who will escape and who will die. It’s not particularly interested, even, in what will make the violence erupt, though genre dictates it must. Instead, Shyamalan, drifting away from these threads so often it deflates the suspense, makes a strikingly directed film like a high-gloss scuzzy character study. It’s about a man (James McAvoy) struggling with his identity, lashing out with frightening intensity as the eerily composed kidnapper, scolding himself as a matronly planner of this evil, regressing into creepily charming childlike naivete as a perpetual kid personality stuck along for the ride. This is hardly convincing representation of mental illness, but as metaphor for a confused, lonely, traumatized creep desperately trying to pull his life together and make sense of his purpose, it has a cockeyed compelling energy. Add to it the girls he takes – two best friends (Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) and a distant acquaintance (Anya Taylor-Joy) snatched from the parking lot of a teenager’s birthday party – trying to figure him out to stay safe, and it’s startling to see how differentiated McAvoy makes the personalities. When’s he’s the harmless youngster, it’s so convincing the immediate tension deescalates, leaving only the worry another facet of his mind will suddenly reappear. 

Shyamalan – with sharp cinematographer Michael Gioulakis (of the similarly confident widescreen creepy It Follows) – glides the camera down dark hallways, or parks at direct bird’s-eye-view angles to take in the tableaus his designs. A man darts out of the dark, into the searing spotlight of a streetlamp, only to disappear again. The slow opening of a car door suddenly reveals a girl’s presence with the dinging of the alarm alerting the villain that it’s ajar. Shyamalan milks moments for maximum suspense, giving over lengthy scenes to Taylor-Joy’s backstory, a wounding story of trauma with a slow-boil reveal that’s borderline distasteful and deeply disturbing, all the more so for its casual reality and horror exposition backdrop. It starts like one of those explaining-the-final-girl’s-hidden-beast-killing-skills flashbacks, but becomes something far more chilling in its emotional underpinnings, especially when the movie leaves her story’s emotional journey so tense and unresolved. The other prong of the tale – therapist Betty Buckley, whose intense professional interest in her unusual client is nonetheless too slow to stop the story before it starts – is given over to origin-story babbling, overexplaining the fractured state of his mind, and the ability for it to manifest convincingly different physicality as he appears to almost shrink into smaller, meeker personas and expand into larger, domineering ones. Yet it’s of a piece with the movie’s stressed and distressed characters, crumbling under the weight of bearing burdens with which they’ve been cursed.  

This is hardly Shyamalan’s best film, but it carries provocative ideas and confident filmmaking. He once more rides the line between inadvertent silliness and ponderous philosophizing, maintaining a satisfying balance through a mix of controlled, assured blocking – sinister rack focus, suspenseful tracking shots, simmering long takes – and coaxing tremendously full-bodied performances from serious performers giving it full attention with nary a condescending wink. If you’re on his wavelength, you’ll know how effective his techniques remain. Here is the work of a filmmaker flexing his style, noodling around a grabbing high concept to moderate effect. It lacks the artful intent of his best work, and the eager genre thrills of his most misunderstood (charming fantasy misfires Lady in the Water, Last Airbender and After Earth, and ersatz R-rated Twilight Zone episode The Happening). But it has his low-key eccentric personality and no-nonsense visual control, and again proves a big screen Shyamalan experience should always be something of an event.

Days of Alternate Past: X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

X-Men: Apocalypse lives up to its name, putting the entire globe in jeopardy, but also proving high stakes spectacles work if you tap into the dread of them. There’s a sequence here where an all-powerful ancient superbeing launches every nuke in the world and it’s shot with such solemn gravity, taking in the faces of regular humans looking up in awe at their imminent possible demise, that it has weight and terror many films of this ilk either skip right past or take for granted. When Bryan Singer’s X-Men was released in 2000 it was considered acceptable stakes for a sci-fi action movie to merely menace a small gathering of dignitaries in New York. But recently, with movies like Batman v. Superman and the Transformers and Avengers regularly tearing up entire cities, there’s been something of a superhero stakes race, threatening ever more danger and destruction for less and less of an effect. When everything’s the end of the world, nothing is.

Now, returning for his fourth time directing this series, Singer knows every other superhero movie somehow takes outsized cataclysms and boils down to the same punching and shooting. Apocalypse understands we really want to see psychic energy swords, teleportation, shape shifting, bolts of lightening, and two telekinetic beings fighting each other on a mental battlefield. It ends with a symphony of superpowers, creatively sent into battle against others in clever combinations. And this CGI slugfest is earned by taking time to introduce its menagerie of mutants, adroitly and organically integrating a dozen or more characters, giving them each great splash page show-off moments as well as an emotional grounding for interwoven arcs. Singer crafts compelling images interested in the visceral horror and whimsical delight of having these powers, never losing sight of either’s impact on the characters in the face of glowing effects-heavy sequences.

This is all part of Singer’s approach to the X-Men, now in its ninth iteration, counting spinoffs. He set a template for the movie world of mutants trying to find acceptance and family. Saving the world is simply an outgrowth of their interpersonal dramas, calamities brought about by their angst. As this movie begins – on a reset timeline after the time-travel loop-de-loop of Days of Future Past – Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is running his school for mutants, including new students like Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and Scott Summers, who will become Cyclops (Tye Sheridan).  Teachers include Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Havoc (Lucas Till). Meanwhile, chameleon Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is running an underground rescue operation for abused or captured mutants like young teleporter Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), while Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is in hiding, living a quiet small-town life in Poland. They just want to live comfortably and secretly with their powers, and Singer, with a screenplay by Simon Kinberg, finds time to seriously consider their attempts at understanding their powers.

Alas, peace is not to be, as the aforementioned superbeing who wants to destroy the world awakens with much fanfare. He is Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac under a pile of blue makeup), the world’s first mutant, an ancient Egyptian worshiped as a God for all his wild powers, then buried comatose under a pyramid for thousands of years. When he wakes up to be the villain of this 1983-set alt-history, he wants to destroy the world, but only because he’s lashing out from jealousy and a God complex. While a CIA agent (Rose Byrne) investigating his return warns Professor X about the looming danger, Apocalypse wanders around gathering up rogue mutants for his army, using his power to tempt them to the dark side by amplifying their gifts. He finds: Storm (Alexandra Shipp), an orphan who can control the weather; Angel (Ben Hardy), a cage-fighter with an impressive wingspan; and Psylocke (Olivia Munn), a psychic with energy blades. As he picks them up, he gives them makeovers and snazzy costumes he conjures out of thin air, a neat, convenient trick.

Apocalypse – a fairly one-note villain, but at least he’s new – gains in power, eventually convincing Magneto to join his crusade to remake the world by bringing it to an end, the better to start over with proper mutant worship again. Magneto is torn between a desire to avenge his tragic past – which adds another heart-wrenching trauma early on here – and a need to prove his power and the potential for mutant dominance. He excavates his pain in a sequence at Auschwitz that’s borderline tasteless before gaining eerie pop power as the conflicted villainous man pulls the entire concentration camp apart in a cloud of debris as exorcism. Fassbender does admirable work bringing real sorrow and grief to his portrayal of Magneto, and makes it fit seamlessly into a big Hollywood sci-fi action confection in which a team of superhero teens led by a bald man in a wheelchair must stop an ancient blue God from ending humanity. Singer maintains an engaged and gripping thriller pace slowly drawing many strands together to the inevitable climactic conflagration.

It sounds complicated, bringing so many characters together and sending them into conflict with each other in a tone that’s both gravely serious and goofy fluff. But Singer pulls off this balancing act while confidently shrugging off baggage of prior films and wearing expectations of so much muchness lightly, engaging in straight-faced comic book appeal without pandering to nerds or apologizing to everyone else. He cares about using the characters in interesting and creative ways, whether it’s sending Quicksilver (Evan Peters) through an exploding building, in a fine repeat and escalation of the last film’s show-stopping slow-mo sequence, or setting Cyclops loose at a target, reveling in the surprise force of his uncontrollable laser-vision. Apocalypse puts aside Civil Rights subtext for a gripping globetrotting adventure on its way to an electric light show spectacle shot for wonderment and dopey-cool impact. But because Singer and his team treat the whole project earnestly – cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel shooting brightly and steadily, capturing performances and effects alike in images that takes in the whole movement and expression of the actions – it has a convincing result.

In a time when superhero movies are churned out as mere content, Singer still makes movies. Apocalypse isn’t short on incident or timeline triangulation. But rather than hitting preordained marks and providing coverage with enough space for teasing future features, he shapes a narrative, building characters to care about with problems to invest in, sending them through varied crescendos and climaxes in setpieces rewarding viewers’ interest with real consequences and fine setups and payoffs contained within the borders of its runtime. (There are echoes and cameos to flatter franchise knowledge, but they aren’t integral to their effect, and add to a genuine comic sense of unashamed retconning.) He deploys polished and poised frames that stand back and handsomely photograph superpowers while understanding that having them and using them takes an emotional toll. It’s fun and involving, all of an exciting, entertaining piece. This isn’t like Captain America: Civil War where characters pop up, show off a power, and then disappear with a tease for their own offshoot. It’s one of the best X-Men movies yet, a full and satisfying ensemble spectacle unto itself.

Future Shock: X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

Its first entry was released 14 years ago in the summer of 2000, making Fox’s X-Men the only superhero franchise to not be concluded, rebooted, remade, or canceled. There have been spin-offs and prequels, but all have fit into one universe, separate and distinct from the other superhero franchises crowding into the multiplexes with increasing regularity. Perhaps because their cinematic origins predate the flat, noisy, homogenous sci-fi slugfests that make up so much of the subgenre, the X-Men movies have managed to retain their idiosyncrasies. Following the plight of mutants, people who are born with strange and varied powers, from as helpful as telekinesis or regeneration, to as useless as a frog-like tongue, there’s an obvious and potent metaphor at the center. A minority group fights for the right to peacefully coexist with the majority. These movies work best when they tap into that real emotion and empathy.

The first sequel, 2003’s X2, has a quiet and unexpected scene in which a teenager comes out as a mutant to his family. (“Have you ever tried not being a mutant?” is his mother’s response.) It’s moving and human, an example of the kind of scene few other superhero movies have room for. Director Bryan Singer, who helmed the first two entries, got the series off on the right note, with slickly designed thrills and the characters showing off their powers in grounded yet comic-book ways, while taking the metaphors very seriously. It’s a good combination. After 11 years and 4 films of varying quality without him, the franchise is once again under Singer’s direction with the latest, X-Men: Days of Future Past, an attempt to bring together the various strands of timelines and plotlines the series has accumulated.

Days of Future Past is serious, a little silly, and geekily detailed. Simon Kinberg’s script features authentically comic-bookish storytelling, quickly lining up a thinly sketched conflict, presenting the powers, winding up the scenarios and then getting tied in time-travel knots before exploding in big full-page spreads of colorful commotion. It begins in a dystopian future where Sentinels, giant mutant-killing robots, have gone wild. Ruthless machines, they’ve turned the world into a wintry hellscape not unlike the future of The Terminator, filled with stray skulls and bands of resistance fighters. It is this dark future from whence the cast of the first few X-Men pictures, including on-again-off-again allies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen), must send the ever-repairable adamantium-claw-wielding Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to prevent the mass-extinction.

Conveniently, that sends him back into the 1970s where the characters of X-Men: First Class, including young Prof. X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender), are about to inadvertently lay the groundwork for the Sentinels. The key line comes from Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who uses her powers to project Wolverine’s consciousness back into his 1970’s body. (See, I told you this was comic-booky.) “Whatever you do becomes our past,” she says to him. That line frees the movie from real-world history and its franchise backstory. Anything can happen. The movie includes the Vietnam war, Paris peace talks, and references to the Kennedy assassination. Richard Nixon consults fictional weapons manufacturer Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage, sporting a great 70’s stache) and unscrupulous scientists. It’s a free and excited blend of alternate history and retcon loop-de-loops enjoyable enough to distract from how completely incomprehensible it is the more you think about it.

It’s a movie that embraces possibilities for fun throwaway details in its plot. A Paris disco blares a Francophone cover of a Motown hit. How many blockbusters have time for that? It’s a movie in which a bunch of great actors chew over dopey expository dialogue and earnest character work with such gravitas and enjoyment that it reads as simply entertaining. The movie takes itself the right amount of serious, willing to wink in amusement at itself. Take this exchange between the fuzzy blue mutant known as Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and the time-travelling Wolverine. Beast: “In the future, do I make it?” Wolverine: “No.”

It’s all treated sincerely enough to keep the plot gears turning, characters intriguing, and action interesting. The filmmakers have thought through the ways various mutant powers can be used in action sequences, allowing the movie to escape the sameness that creeps into these kinds of movies. If heroes and villains are capable of great sci-fi/fantasy feats, why do so many movies of this type culminate in endless point-and-shoot, punching bag calamities? Any old hero can do that, no superpowers required. Here there are fine pop visuals, including a great sequence with a super-fast mutant who can zip around a room and take out a whole squadron of bad guys in the space of a blink. At one point Singer slows the action down, letting him get through a confrontation while all the regular-speed folks are moving so imperceptibly as to not be moving at all. It’s a neat concept cleverly staged.

Most welcome is the way the plot hinges on preventing violence to save the future. It doesn’t come down to a knockdown drag-out fight, but rather a race-against-the-clock to prevent an inciting incident that will lead to bloodshed decades later. There’s no shortage of action, with the shape-shifting Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) playing the part of globetrotting villain and the 70s X-Men giving chase while, 50 years in the future, X-Men ready themselves for a confrontation with a massive fleet of Sentinels. But the thrust of the film is still the metaphoric, with mutants continuing to stand in for any oppressed minority group fighting over how best to fight for rights and protections. Days of Future Past adds to the mix commentary on drones, with the mindless robots meant to protect going horribly bad, and drug addiction, featuring a subplot with a character hooked on a substance that dulls mutant powers presented in a way that looks a lot like heroin.

That’s all just flavoring, though. After a certain point, Days of Future Past doesn’t have time for quieter human moments. It’s content to borrow emotion with quick flashes of previous entries as it hurtles to the plot contortions necessary to tangle together the various loose ends it’s required to bring together in order to move the franchise forward. This is a movie that slowly loses cleverness as it creaks towards necessary plot points and tidy franchise care. Its time travel narrative carefully clears one table while setting two or three more. That wore me out by the end, and makes my head spin trying to piece together the web of alternate universes and timeline fractures implied by the events. Those burdens hold this solid entertainment back from being one of the X-Men’s best.

Of course, maybe the novelty has just worn off. This one has the feel of a curtain call about it, bringing everyone back on stage for one last bow. It’s warm and comfortable to see old cast members returning, even as it’s coasting on the nostalgia of seeing actors inhabit characters they haven’t in nearly a decade. In the feeling of completion that’s brought about by the end, it feels like a satisfying series finale. And yet, barring catastrophe, it will go on. I’ve had affection for these movies, the first two buying a lot of goodwill through subsequent highs and lows. But after this one acts far more enjoyably like a conclusion, I’m not sure how much more I want or could take. At any rate, the X-Men will go on, borne back ceaselessly into days of future past. This entry is fun, even as it adds layers of complication and continuity wrinkles in the name of streamlining and simplifying. The characters are sharp, the acting sharper, the metaphors workable, and the spectacle bright and clear. It hits its marks well.