Blake Lively has had a very strange career up to this point. She was huge with her show Gossip Girl which propelled her movie career that has been shaky. She had thankless roles in The Town and Green Lantern but really took off with The Shallows and more recently, A Simple Favor, a film she received massive praise for. Now she is trying to capitalize off that huge boost of a film, where will The Rhythm Section fall in her filmography? Unfortunately it is towards the lower end. The Rhythm Section is a muddled, boring trudge of a film that suffers from a lack of direction and a mishandling of a talented cast.
The plot of The Rhythm Section follows Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) a woman who loses her family due to a plane crash that was the result of a terrorist bombing. Three years later she is a broken woman who engages in drugs and prostitution, dealing with grief from her trajedy. When a journalist brings her past back up, it awakens a desire in Patrick to seek the truth and get revenge on everyone involved in the attack. It is a simple enough story that we have seen before and yet it is incredibly complicated. That’s one of the biggest problems with this film. It is not the perfect concept, but at least have a clear through line for the audience to grasp onto. Once you start throwing in job hits and no name villains and an overly long training session, you lose the audience because we become bored. Now it doesn’t matter where this thing ends up because all of our interest has gone out of the theater. It is just like a first impression. You only get one and if you fumble it, getting everyone back on your side is exceptionally difficult and near impossible.
What this film suffers from the most is a lack of direction. First off, this title is terrible. The Rhythm Section is referenced maybe twice throughout and it is not important to the plot. It explains how you breath and by the end of the film, it is as if they wanted it to be a big plot point but then completely forgot about it. Reminds me of Peppermint two years ago when the title had zero to do with the film. That’s just the title, everything else is a mess as well. Director Reed Morano just seemed to have zero interest in this story and as a result put together a bunch of puzzle pieces from different puzzles that didn’t connect. This story is based on a book by Mark Burnell who also wrote the screenplay. Adapting a book to film is tough and that is why screenwriters are hired for this. It is not the same thing as being an author and you can see where Burnell struggled with that. Same thing happened with JK Rowling and her most recent films. Can we stop letting authors write screenplays by themselves please?
The lack of direction stretches heavily into the cast. A talented group of individuals that are misused at every turn. Blake Lively is given a ridiculous accent that she is not able to pull off and it is distracting the entire time. She is giving her all and committing to what she is told, but what she has to do just makes her look embarrassing. Sterling K. Brown is left to do busy work. He is a contact Lively speaks to on multiple occasions but it is never really explained just how big his role in the plot is. He forms a sexual relationship with Lively that you see in the trailer and it so quick and out of nowhere that you don’t buy it. So when their final scene together happens, there is no emotion behind it, just empty calories. Jude Law is actually really good as a sort of mentor to Lively. He is tough and shut off emotionally and it actually works for Law. The frustration comes from how often it seems to be the case that Law is really good in a bad movie. He has all the talent in the world and can’t find his way into a good movie to save his life.
In the end, the writing was on the wall for The Rhythm Section as soon as it got its release date. Choosing to open a movie the weekend of the Super Bowl is the ultimate sign of no confidence since it is widely known that you do not do that. Everyone will be at home watching the game instead of at the movies and you are just pushing your film off a boat if you do this. This is just a mishandled, boring action film with little action that feels like a letdown for the talent involved. Enjoy the football game instead.
The Verdict