Atomic Blonde

Review Written By Michel J. Ruhland










Michael's Movie Grade: C+

Review: A fun cold war thriller with a great visual style and lead character, but the story leaves a little to be desired.

Maybe the best thing about this movie is its great visual filmmaking. While there is little groundbreaking about this style does keep your attention and enjoyment even in the film's weakest moments. This visual style carries over to so much. Even the way certain hotel rooms and clubs look is absolutely beautiful. On top of that these set designs create a fantastic sense of atmosphere that can be seen throughout the whole movie. The cinematography is equally effective. It is great to look at but never shows off, but simply adds to the atmosphere. This is not like a Jean Luc Goddard film or a Alfred Hitchcock film, where the visual style astounds you and even expands the way you think of cinema, but it adds a lot of fun and enjoyment to this movie. Also important to this movie is that the main character is really interesting. She is a bit of a complex character, but what ever she does is fascinating and believable. Sadly she happens to be the only interesting character in this movie, as the rest are rather bland.

The story on the other hand seems like it could have used more time. Since we know the main character is going to survive in all the flashback scenes (which make up most of this movie), we need something else to gain suspense. Sadly this something else is kind of missing. The story isn't bad, per say, in fact it is kind of enjoyable. However we left with little to make suspenseful scenes work because our main source of suspense has been eliminated and replaced with very little.

This is a very violent movie. The fights are made realistic and bloody. While I am not a fan of this as I prefer either off-screen violence or bloodless violence and get a little uneasy with gore, it does have a problem that reaches beyond that. This is that the movie often uses 1980's pop songs on the soundtrack. This kind of a thing worked for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, because the action there is stylized. However with more realistic action the use of pop songs feels at odds with what we see on screen.

However big this movie's faults are I still enjoyed it because I really like the main character and the visual atmosphere. The movie also has a really good twist ending which I won't spoil here. It is very faulted but fun.

-Michael J. Ruhland