The Rhythm Section Cert: 15 / 109 mins / Dir. Reed Morano / Trailer
From time to time, dear reader, even I of all people look at the headlining cast of an otherwise nondescript movie and think 'well this must have something going for it if [INSERT NAME OF PROMINENT PERFORMER]is in it'. And from time to time, I shuffle out of the cinema shortly afterward thinking '...yeah that was just to keep the mortgage ticking over between bigger films, wasn't it?
And so to London (and New York, Madrid, Marseilles and a whole host of easily captionable locations) as Blake Lively plays Stephanie, a woman embroiled in addiction and squalor, struggling to come to terms with her family being killed in a plane crash three years earlier. When she's visited by journalist Proctor (Raza Jaffrey) revealing that the crash was actually a terrorist bombing that was subsequently covered up by the authorities, the chain of intrigue leads to the glens of Inverness where Stephanie finds herself training to be an assassin under the enigmatic but harsh 'B' (Jude Law). The hopes are that revenge and closure will be in the same package, as Stephanie embarks on a world tour of 'cleaning house'...
MUTED John Wick, it is not. Adapted for the screen by Mark Burnell from his novel of the same name, The Rhythm Section is a muted take on the contemporary spy-thriller. At first the setup and exposition feels efficient if unambitious, but the visual and scripted shorthand continues into the main narrative and comes off as a bit overcooked. On one hand, there's the feeling that this story might have just worked better on the page. But on the other, there are even more interchangably-glum novels like this than there are movies, so who knows where the quality-bar really falls?
Blake Lively does quite well from it all*1, although with a storyline as procedural as this it often feels like she's over-acting. Speaking of such matters, I dread to think how much weight Jude Law gained over the shoot, what with the amount of scenery he chews through. Everyone else turns up and says their lines on time, including a criminally under-used Sterling K. Brown. This isn't particularly inspired casting, but then it's not a particularly inspired story.
SUBTITLED The film always feels like it's about to get started. There are a few long-take action sequences which are interesting from a film-making point of view, but Atomic Blonde had those and was also fun. This isn't bad, it just isn't memorable. With Bond-meisters Eon Productions' name attached, you may well expect better, but ultimately, putting The Rhythm Section out two months before their own No Time To Die seems like a colossal waste of resources.
Best line comes from Jude Law's 'B' during the training section:
"It's not a tragedy, it's a cliché. You're a cliché, you haven't got what it takes."
*1 Although on a minor note, Lively's accent can never quite decide if if wants to hail from South London or the Home Counties. I mean I've certainly heard a lot worse from other performers (not least Law himself), but you know that I wouldn't be able to not bring this up. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Mandy Cert: 18 / 121 mins / Dir. Panos Cosmatos / Trailer
It does seem that every new Nic Cage film arrives accompanied by the descriptor 'going full Nic Cage' as its selling point. Obviously the guy can't be trapped in an ever-escalating gyroscope of cinema, but it does sometimes feel like movies are being written with him specifically in mind.
This offering from director and co-writer Panos Cosmatos sees Cage star as Red, a logger residing in the Californian mountains with his artist girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) in 1983. When the members of a cult pass through the backwater, their leader Jeremiah (Linus Roache) becomes obsessed with Mandy and orders his followers to kidnap her to join the group. Mandy is resistant to both the ideology and the psychotropic drugs forced upon her, and in a fit of pique Jeremiah orders her to be killed while Red watches. Left for dead, our protagonist frees himself and embarks on a rampaging odyssey of brutal revenge, where the boundaries of reality become as warped as the morality of his nemeses…
CAGE And it's glorious. Two hours of extravagantly outlandish, glorious carnage paying homage to space rock and pulp fantasy novels. Because obviously in a movie where cultists play an ocarina to summon a gang of knock-off Cenobites on quad bikes without batting an eyelid, Nic Cage is going to wear a Ray-Ban Aviators as safety goggles while he forges himself a battle-axe, before later eschewing that weapon to have a chainsaw fight. Everything about this screams fuck yeah.
Mandy is the sort of movie where the viewer never loses track of what's going on, but if it was paused and they were asked to give a summary probably wouldn't know where to start. It's a ponderous, vigorous, hallucinatory companion piece to Drive Angry with notes of Rocky Horror and The Hills Have Eyes. It would be self-indulgent if it wasn't so gleefully volatile.
GOFFE As much as the film effects an air of schlocky trash, Mandy can't disguise the precision and joy with which it's been made. As if Robert Rodriguez, Eli Roth and Darren Aronofsky raised a child in some twisted parody of Three Men And A Baby and then unleashed it upon the world. And that's not to say this is an exploitative, mindless gorefest - it's not. But it clearly loves the films which are and has channeled that fondness through the prism of Nic Cage's desensitised fury.
The film is split into acts, each presented with their own uniquely styled (yet visually continuous) title card. Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb treats the story like his own fever dream, with neither a prop nor pixel out of place in each meticulously constructed shot. Whether it's the blood-hued interior of a stark, angular wooden church, an alien cosmos resting over the forest skyline or just Nic Cage screaming on the toilet in his pants as he necks vodka from the bottle, you'll be hard pushed to find more arresting imagery this year in such an accessible format*1.
SHERIFF'S BADGE Mandy is precisely the sort of thing I enjoy travelling into London to watch, and it quickly became apparent why this didn't play at my local cinema (not that I'd expected it to). At this late stage, the cage fight*2 for the Film Of The Year award just got a bit more crowded.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
From time to time, dear reader, even I of all people look at the headlining cast of an otherwise nondescript movie and think 'well this must have something going for it if [INSERT NAME OF PROMINENT PERFORMER] is in it'. And from time to time, I shuffle out of the cinema shortly afterward thinking '...yeah that was just to keep the mortgage ticking over between bigger films, wasn't it?
