Thursday, August 17, 2017

Atomic Blonde - A Unique Female-led Ultra Violent Action Movie

This was the second of our movie marathon experience yesterday during my leave day. Surprisingly this movie did not play in all cinema chains and therefore the options to see it was rather limited. As it happened, it was playing also in the location where I saw The Battleship Island. So it was very convenient to just continue watching this. Well we shall move on to the movie itself now.

Brief Story Line

The movie was set in the year 1989 during the time when Germany was still divided into East and West and Berlin was having a large wall separating both sides. It was also a time of the cold war between the US and its allies with the communists represented by the Soviets and its allies. During this time, lots of secret agents were working both sides and becoming spies in different parts of the world. A secret list of these information was kept in a microfilm inside a watch by an East Germany official with code name Spyglass (Eddie Marsan - Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Ray Donovan TV series etc).


Spyglass wanted to defect to West Germany and was going to be assisted by Percival (James McAvoy - Split, X-Men: Apocalypse etc) who was the Berlin station chief and part of the West's secret agencies. However when things got awry, the British intelligence MI6 decided to assign another agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron - Mad Max: Fury Road, Monster and many more) to help Percival. 

When Lorraine arrived at Berlin, she seemed to be followed around by a mysterious woman taking photos of her (Sofia Boutella - The Mummy, Kingsman: The Secret Service etc). To make things more complicated was the fact that Lorraine's arrival seemed to be known by the Soviet agents led by Bremovych (Roland Møller) who was also aiming to get "the list". With her ability and experience as a great spy, Lorraine would try her best to acquire the list while fending off the various challenges she had to face from the Soviets who seemed to always know her every move.

So could she finished her mission? Who was the mysterious woman following her? Find them all in this movie with extreme fighting scenes.

End of Brief Story Line

Well when the movie was said to have wonderful action sequence, it was absolutely true. The fighting sequence in this movie was just awesome. The hand to hand combat between Charlize Theron with the German police, and with the Soviets were wonderfully done. The best fighting scenes were definitely the one in the old building in East Berlin where she had to fight with the Soviet agents one by one for probably more than 10 minutes nonstop. And by nonstop was that it really seemed to be continuously done and not even a few minutes break. I am sure that if you watched this scene you would be absolutely thrilled.

Apart from those action sequences (which were quite frequent every now and then), unfortunately the pace of the movie was too slow (my wife even dozed off for a while during the conversations scene). I do not really know where it went wrong, but probably due to the way the story was told in a backflash kind of way where Lorraine was de-briefing his superiors in MI6 including a CIA operative (played by John Goodman - Kong: Skull IslandPatriots Day etc). This made the movie seemed to be losing momentum and the pace was totally slowed down. Unfortunately these parts were pretty frequent.

The plot itself was not that really great. It was kind of standard spy story with some twists though not the real mind blowing type (At least I was surprised with one of those twists). Despite having James McAvoy and Sofia Boutella, but the real star of the movie was definitely Charlize Theron, which must be given two thumbs up for those wonderful fighting sequence. It was a good thing that the sound system in the cinema was giving a great effect. Some even compared the fights to John Wick movies which was understandable considering they were also ultra violent hand to hand combat. But where John Wick excelled in the story telling was what this movie was lacking.

By the way due to the gruesome fighting and killing sequences, the movie was given R rating in the US and in Indonesia was only for adults above 21 years of age. There were also some nude scenes & kissing scenes that were cut by the Indonesian censorship body. So definitely not for younger audience. One thing that was cool of the director was the way he was able to recreate the 1989 feel with the costumes and especially with some 80s songs. 99 Luftballons was one particular song that was played more than once in the movie which was actually a song for anti war protest by a German band named Nena and suit just nicely in here.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a female-led ultra violent action movie and you really want to see Charlize Theron kicked a$$, then this one should be really satisfying. But please do not expect this to be a wonderfully written story, just focus on the amazing stunts that were totally worth to watch. 

Happy watching!

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars


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