‘Atomic Blonde’ Anoints Charlize Theron As A Bankable Bad-ass

5 August 2017 | 11:41 am | Anthony Carew

"Atomic Blonde largely resembles one long neon-lit, synth-pop-scored, New Wave vodka commercial."

ATOMIC BLONDE

It’s the end of the ’80s, the end of the Cold War, the end of a divided Berlin. With the Wall about to topple, all those old secrets —of MI6, CIA, KGB, Stasi, and general spy-movie-ness— are set to spill out. It’s a mess that needs to be cleaned up. So, in swans Charlize Theron, all peroxide bob and glamorous trench-coats and dangerous stilettos, ready to kick the ass of any bearded Russian goon or hatted German cop that thinks of looking at her sideways.

There’s the regular spy-movie biz —meeting moles, dispatched informers, double and triple crosses, smuggling of secret info, playing things each way— but, mostly, there’s ass-kicking. Director David Leitch is a stunt coordinator turned filmmaker, and, thus, it’s no surprise that Atomic Blonde is strongest as work of fight choreography. There’s a single-take slugfest on the stairs that just keeps going, a kitchen showdown in which freezer doors and hotplates are put to face-smashing use, and a length of fire-hose turned into a weapon (these betraying the fact that Leitch worked on the Bourne series, cinema’s greatest shrine to using of domestic utensils in fight scenes).

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Beyond its many inventive ways to beat people up, Atomic Blonde largely resembles one long neon-lit, synth-pop-scored, New Wave vodka commercial. It’s like a cutesy, comic-book romp, filled with cigarettes and stoli; blasting very-familiar soundtrack-placement jams from Bowie, Bowie & Queen, Flock Of Seagulls, Depeche Mode, The Clash, Public Enemy; and cutesier use of George Michael’s Father Figure and ’Til Tuesday’s Voices Carry. There’s also very-expected use of Nena’s 99 Luftballons and Peter Schilling’s Major Tom, these anthems of Cold War Germany making Atomic Blonde play like Deutschland ’89, basically.

Beyond the fights and the soundtracks cues, there’s a whole story to type about, I suppose: a framing narrative in which Theron recounts her misadventures to a pair of posh Majesty’s-secret-service types, James Faulkner and Toby Jones, and John Goodman’s bearded, bristling, pissed-off American. When Theron crashlands in Berlin, she eventual ends up an ill-at-ease ally with James McAvoy’s fur-coat-clad punk double-agent, who’s seemingly more into back-alley black-market deals —and banging anonymous women— than old-fashioned espionage. Sofia Boutella plays a femme fatale, a French double-agent making eyes at Theron.

That’s all, really, we need go into. In fact, for many, all the intricately-plotted spy-movie reversals will seem superfluous. This isn’t a film about the difficulties of the undercover trade, nor, even, about the tension of working behind enemy lines. It’s, instead, about the punishment of physical combat. In its balletically-staged stoushes, no one gets out unharmed; and, even our heroine herself gets pounded. She shows up, at the film’s beginning, with a vicious black eye, and the narrative duly knocks her about.

The greater narrative, beyond all these fights, is, really, Theron’s ascension to action-movie hero status; following on from her Mad Max turn, Atomic Blonde officially anoints her as bankable multiplex bad-ass. And she didn’t even have to make a super-hero movie to earn such a status.

THE BIG SICK

It’s memoir-as-rom-com: star/writer Kumail Nanjiani and co-writer Emily V. Gordon turning their romantic –and medical— travails into a warm-and-friendly comedy. Pakistani stand-up comic meets All-American psych student, boy meets girl, dating turns into an ongoing relationship, the traditional values of his Pakistani family loom as potential union-busting problem, and, then, like some real-life riff on Morrissey lyrics, Nanjiani is dealing with a Girlfriend In A Coma.

In making a romantic-comedy that isn’t beholden to genre clichés, Nanjiani and Gordon have roped in people who’ve previously poked at the genre: producer Judd Apatow, who’s long studied the intersection of genre-tropes and realism; and director Michael Showalter, who —with his ol’ bro David Wain— tore rom-com clichés apart with the genre mockery They Came Together.

This is manifest, most notably, in Gordon’s character, played by Zoe Kazan. Rather than being romantic object, or even romantic projection, she’s a defiant element, her own person even within Nanjiani’s story. “I love it when men test me on my taste,” Kazan says, early on, one of the great moments where the character refuses to be simple archetype or mere love-interest.

Kazan is great in the film; even if, for most of it, she’s stuck in a hospital bed, kept alive by machines. During those moments, Nanjiani plays off her parents, a pissy Holly Hunter and agreeable Ray Romano; the film becoming, in those stretches, as much about their relationship as the central one. It’s all warm, friendly stuff, granted real meaning by the real history behind it. But it’s also an Apatovian rom-com: determinedly middle-brow to the last.

THE TRIP TO SPAIN

Dad jokes.

They’re the sum of the ongoing Trip series, in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play themselves —or versions thereof— on the road, going to fancy restaurants. They’re officially works of docudrama, with scripted developments in the lives of their leads —romantic entanglements, children, careers to navigate— brought into relief by the fact that they’re far from home.

Except, it’s hard to remember anything from any of these films other than Coogan and Brydon doing impersonations of Michael Caine, various Bond actors, Anthony Hopkins. With The Trip To Spain, and the whole series, there’s an amiable charm, the natural back-and-forth rapport between Coogan and Brydon easy to be around. But, with their made-for-TV set-ups and cinematic-comfort-food warmth, these films have serious limits to their worth, and serious questions to ask about their ultimate meaning.