Sight&Sound - 04.2020

REVIEWS

74 | Sight&Sound | April 2019

Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson

At one point in this movie, Jude Law’s rugged

loner B, living a hardy off-grid existence

somewhere in the Scottish Highlands

following the murky events that saw him

kicked out of MI6, accuses Blake Lively’s

heroine Stephanie of being a cliché. She

should have thanked him. This action thriller

from Reed Morano, best known for TV’s The

Handmaid’s Tale, is at its best when it succumbs

to the pleasures of genre and quits posing

as a rough-hewn psychological drama.

The first 45 minutes or so of The Rhythm Section

have the mottled look of gritty realism – Lively’s

flesh is blotched with bruises, her sweater full

of holes, flies dawdle across windowpanes.

Stephanie was once a beaming Oxford student

with a loving family. But when they die in a

plane crash, her life takes a nosedive into drug

abuse, sex work and depression. That is, until

a freelance reporter turns up and gives her

just enough information to spark an unlikely

revenge mission. All the surface grottiness is so

much set dressing, though. This screenplay is

so riddled with fallacies that Stephanie might

as well be zooming across country in an Aston

Martin as snoring on a National Express coach.

After B has trained Stephanie in spycraft and

combat, she’s ready to jet off to the continent to

play vigilante, passing herself off as a notorious

contract killer. It’s when she starts buying wigs

and plane tickets that the film begins to motor:

Stephanie makes a neatly androgynous assassin

when stalking her prey in Tangier and Marseille,

but dresses up like Bettie Page for a lethal

assignation in a Manhattan penthouse. For all her

prowess in the action scenes, however, Lively’s

performance is a bit of a blank. Law is solid as

her gruff mentor, but Sterling K. Brown steals

his scenes as a mysterious ‘information broker’.

If the screenplay is as patchy as Lively’s British

accent, this is nevertheless a good-looking film.

Morano has an impressive cinematography

CV, and Sean Bobbitt’s photography is a

constant pleasure, including the film’s best

moment – a high-energy car chase shot in one

exhilarating take, the camera whipping back

and forth from Lively’s face to the hazards

ahead. Not a bad metaphor for a movie that’s at

its best when it keeps its eyes on the road.

The Rhythm Section

United Kingdom/Ireland/USA 2019

Director: Reed Morano

Certificate 15 109m 27s

London, present day. Stephanie’s life has spiralled into

self-destructive drug use and sex work following the

death of her family in a plane crash. Keith, a freelance

reporter, tells her that the plane was felled by a bomb

made by a Reza Mohammed. Stephanie tries to find and

kill Reza but her plan backfires and Keith is murdered.

Stephanie tracks down Keith’s source, B – an ex-MI6

man living in rural Scotland. B trains Stephanie and

gives her the connections to go after Reza and the

man who ordered the bombing, identified only as

U-17. Stephanie goes to Madrid to meet information

broker Serra, posing as an assassin. She takes on the

contract killing of two people involved in the plane

plot, then quits and returns to Serra. B tells her that

Reza and U-17 are in Marseille. When Stephanie goes

there, she finds Reza about to blow up a bus. She

manages to evacuate the passengers before the blast.

She then kills Serra, having realised that he is U-17.

Produced by

Michael G. Wilson

Barbara Broccoli

Screenplay

Mark Burnell

Based on his novel

Director of

Photography

Sean Bobbitt

Editor

Joan Sobel

Production Designer

Tom Conroy

Music

Steve Mazzaro

Sound Mixer

Gary Dodkin

Costume Designer

Eimer Ní

Mhaoldomhnaigh

Visual Effects

Bluebolt

Supervising Stunt/

Fight Coordinator

Olivier Schneider

©Eon Productions

Limited

Production

Companies

Paramount Pictures

and Global Road

Entertainment

present in association

with TMP, Ingenious

Media an Eon

production

A Reed Morano film

Irish production

company: Four

Provinces Films Ltd

Produced by

Whitebeard Films

Executive Producers

Mark Burnell

Rob Friedman

Vaishali Mistry

Donald Tang

Simon Williams

Gregg Wilson

Stuart Ford

Greg Shapiro

Cast

Blake Lively

Stephanie Patrick

Jude Law

Iain Boyd, ‘B’

Sterling K. Brown

Marc Serra

Max Casella

Giler

Raza Jaffrey

Keith Proctor

Richard Brake

Lehmans

Tawfeek Barhom

Reza Mohammed

Dolby Digital

In Colour

Prints by

DeLuxe

[2.35:1]

Distributor

Paramount

Pictures UK

Time and punishment: Blake Lively

Credits and Synopsis

the visuals can be magnificent, even

wild. Directed by Marjane Satrapi,

whose 2007 debut film was an adaptation of

her own graphic novel Persepolis, and with

often extravagantly lush cinematography by

Anthony Dod Mantle, Radioactive is classically

gorgeous one minute, as a pensive Marie reclines

in her laboratory, milky sunlight filtering in

through the dusty windowpane, and lurid the

next. At one point, Curie has a hallucinatory

vision involving the dancer Loie Fuller swirling

and pallbearers in phosphorescent robes.

Each night she snuggles up in bed with her

vial of luminous green radium glowing in her

palm. The film’s score, by Evgueni and Sacha

Galperine, is similarly rich with small surprises.

Given the pace at which Radioactive clatters

through the events of Curie’s life, the admirable

clarity of its scientific explanations and those

diverting splashes of colour, it seems designed

to work as edutainment for a younger audience:

the inspirational life of a great woman of science

told with verve. Pike’s portrayal of Madame

Curie sits at odds with that reading, though.

She’s frosty rather than feisty, awkwardly filled

with regret over her greatest achievement, and

distraught over the loss of her husband and

collaborator. It’s a performance that offers more

than a poster girl for female achievement and

gives Radioactive a welcome ruminative quality,

in tune with its subject’s unparalleled intellect.

Paris, 1934. As an ailing Marie Curie is

taken into hospital, she recalls her life.

In 1893, Pierre Curie invites her to share his lab

after she is unfairly evicted from the Sorbonne.

They collaborate, fall in love and marry. Soon

their announcement of the discovery of two new

elements is met with great acclaim and a shared

Nobel Prize. Pierre’s health suffers due to radium

exposure, and one night he falls under a carriage

and is trampled to death. Marie is distraught,

but eventually begins an affair with a married

colleague, prompting a scandal. Amid controversy,

she is awarded a second Nobel and a job at the

Sorbonne. At the outbreak of World War I, Marie

lobbies the government for mobile X-ray machines.

She dies after having visions of the

consequences of her work and of Pierre.

Produced by

Tim Bevan

Eric Fellner

Paul Webster

Screenplay

Jack Thorne

Based on the book

[Radioactive: Marie

& Pierre Curie, A Tale

of Love and Fallout]

by Lauren Redniss

Director of

Photography

Anthony Dod Mantle

Editor

Stéphane Roche

Production

Designer

Michael Carlin

Music

Evgueni Galperine

Sacha Galperine

Costume Designer

Consolata Boyle

Production

Companies

Studiocanal, Amazon

Studios, Working

Title, Shoebox Films

Executive

Producers

Joe Wright

Amelia Granger

Ron Halpern

Didier Lupfer

Cast

Rosamund Pike

Marie Curie

Sam Riley

Pierre Curie

Aneurin Barnard

Paul Langevin

Simon Russell

Beale

Gabriel Lippmann

Katherine

Parkinson

Jeanne Langevin

Sian Brooke

Bronia

Anya Taylor-Joy

Irene Curie

In Colour

Distributor

Studiocanal Limited

Credits and Synopsis