Atomic Blonde (2017)

Between Atomic Blonde and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I’m really digging the “retro spy” genre – and I’m including throwback spy flicks like Kingsman. There’s something very satisfying about the technological limits placed on the story, which must proceed without the advantages of cell phones and Wi-Fi; usually that careful crafting leads to a more cerebral script – something I always appreciate – and ends up having a trickle-down effect on the rest of the creative process. Going into the theater, I hadn’t known that Atomic Blonde was a period piece, nor had I realized quite how much I’d like the film – both of which were welcome surprises.

It’s 1989. The Berlin Wall is about to come down, and MI6 sends Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) behind the Iron Curtain to find a list of operatives stolen from a dead agent. Berlin station chief Percival (James McAvoy) helps her into East Berlin and enlists her help with East German defector Spyglass (Eddie Marsan), who’s stolen the list. While Lorraine looks for the truth amid a dalliance with French operative Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella), she begins to wonder who she can trust.

I was exhausted after Atomic Blonde – not because the movie was overlong or boring to the point that my hindquarters went numb, but because I’d had to keep up with the film’s sneaky storytelling while enduring the intense and enervating action sequences. Atomic Blonde is not a film that goes for easy moments; none of it looks effortless, and the audience has to work just as hard as Lorraine to discover the identity of Satchel, a traitor in the ranks of MI6. But at least we have the good fortune not to get in the middle of those fight scenes, because they’re incredibly vicious.

Director David Leitch has done a fair job of staging his action scenes like single takes; there’s some digital trickery, to be sure, but in the moment it looks as though these long fights are all done in a straight cinematic line. We’ve got two long and arresting fights staged in apartment buildings – one in the living room, one on the stairs – that most other directors might have done in forty-cuts-per-second shakycam, but Leitch’s patient attention to the intensity of the fights allows them to exhaust the moviegoer and the characters, whose breathy pauses and stumbles make the combat even more real. Brownie points are due to the storytellers who devised Lorraine’s creative uses of an extension cord, a record player, and a doorframe.

In the interminable wait for Bond 25 and the ever-present question of whether Daniel Craig will suit up once or twice more, Charlize Theron proves herself a capable “Lady Bond,” although that does a disservice to Lorraine Broughton. There are certain similarities – their capabilities in close combat, their equal dexterity in the art of seduction – but Lorraine almost feels more of a piece with Bryan Mills in Taken, possessed of a “certain set of skills” that make her unstoppable, even as the odds against her increase. She’s more vulnerable than Mills, though, emotionally and physically; her stake in this fight is personal, and her fling with Delphine seems more genuine than any Bond girl’s. Moreover, those moments where she picks herself off the floor and continues to fight, even as she’s bruised and short of breath, give the character a smartly-crafted strength.

The soundtrack to the film is a smashing mix tape of 80s tracks, and the cinematography is as unforgivingly fluorescent as I imagine the 1980s would have been. It all adds up to a nicely unified experience, where the stark white lights of an interrogation room echo the neon pipes of a Berlin hotel room. Amid it all, there is the brainy sense of needing to keep up and the fervent hope that, as the credits roll, this won’t be the last time we see Lorraine Broughton. I’m ready to enroll her in the same camp as Wonder Woman, welcome alternatives to the same-old/same-old dudes who have run these genres for fifty years. Roll on the new, but please give me a moment to catch my breath.

Atomic Blonde is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, language throughout, and some sexuality/nudity.” Directed by David Leitch. Written by Kurt Johnstad. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart. Starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Sofia Boutella, Eddie Marsan, John Goodman, and Toby Jones.

The Mummy (2017)

Going to see The Mummy, ostensibly the first film in Universal’s monster mash-up “Dark Universe,” is a bit like going on a first date with an overeager suitor. After a number of headscratching decisions regarding the opening course, said suitor quickly begins planning out your entire future together, only for you to slam the breaks on and say, “Hang on a minute, we’ve only just met! What was your name again?” By the end of the date, you’re asked, “Shall we do this again for the next few years?” while you struggle to form a response that won’t insult by asking your suitor to change everything that brought you two to this moment.

Put another way, and I don’t imagine this has been said by too many people very recently, I would have rather spent the foregoing two hours with Brendan Fraser.

(Note: there’s some degree of disagreement about whether or not the identity of Russell Crowe’s character is a plot spoiler. I had thought Universal had long ago announced this, but I’ve seen critics be cagey about it. I’ll say that it’s not revealed until about halfway through the film, although Crowe appears here and there in the first half, and if you’d really rather not know, skip the plot summary and just imagine it says “Tom Cruise meets a mummy.”)

Tom Cruise stars as Nick Morton, soldier of fortune and antiquities looter in present-day Iraq who stumbles upon – or rather, quite literally falls headlong into – the hidden tomb of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), the forgotten princess of Egypt who was mummified after a string of wicked misdeeds. Morton falls in with Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) and her shadowy employer Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), who have their own designs on the unearthed sarcophagus.

I’ll not say that The Mummy is a travesty; I won’t get angry about it or inveigh against it. I’ll say, however, that The Mummy is clunky and mechanical and, like its eponymous villainess, more than a little bit lifeless. Perhaps it’s a case of over-trailer-itis, which seems to be going around these days, and indeed more than three-quarters of the plot of The Mummy, in precise chronological order, is contained in the trailers, such that the only real turns of the plot left for the film proper involve how exactly Tom Cruise gets himself out of this pickle. (The climax of the film, meanwhile, is its own little bundle of problems, about which I’ll say more later.)

Take for example the centerpiece action sequence, a plane crash that was done with a surprising amount of practical effects. And if you’d seen the trailers, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a page out of the Mission: Impossible playbook, but where it’d be a rousing thrill over there, here it’s somewhat leaden, devoid of much suspense (again, partially because the trailers outright revealed who survives the crash, and how). At least one horror/thriller set piece ends up being just a product of a character’s imagination, while death itself becomes quite impermanent – par for the Mummy course, I grant you – resulting in a film that feels bereft of consequence and ultimately void of significance.

Unfortunately, the things in the film that feel of the most significance are the elements one senses are being introduced, with all the subtlety of a flashing “detour ahead” sign, to set up future films in the Dark Universe franchise. The director, Alex Kurtzman, had done the press rounds in December talking about making these aspects – including a secret organization, Prodigium, which is essentially a monster S.H.I.E.L.D. – organic to the story of The Mummy, and I have to say on that front the film fails spectacularly. It is, in fact, akin to entering another film entirely; Tom Cruise leaves the plot of The Mummy, enters the Prodigium plot, and then returns to The Mummy without that second act doing much more than introducing a plot-sized bottle of continuity glue to hold the franchise together. The worst of it is that the Prodigium plot is actually a little bit interesting, a bit unpredictable, and a bit audacious for a film that otherwise plays so safely by the numbers. That is not, however, to say that the Prodigium plot works particularly well as the second act of The Mummy, overladen as it is with exposition that continually reminds us of the inorganic, grafted-on quality of this subplot. Russell Crowe turns up, monologues a bit about the film we could have been watching, and then ushers us away to our regularly scheduled movie, already in progress.

Then the film ends – or rather, doesn’t end, because every plot thread that’s tied up gets unraveled almost immediately, and you can hear any one of the six screenwriters saying, “Hold up a second, we might want to use that in another film.” (Six screenwriters! No wonder this film feels more like a collection of bits than a singular narrative.) The film is trying to end, but the corporate demand for a franchise results in, appropriately enough, a Frankenstein’s corpse of a creature that isn’t permitted to fade away. Consequently, The Mummy ends up being more Iron Man 2 than Iron Man, forgetting that it was the insular success of the first film that allowed the series to bend toward franchise, in all its best and worst excesses. Then there’s a bit that feels unfinished and deferred to another film when you realize that one of the main characters closes the film in shadow and obscurity because something has very probably changed about that character’s face, but you’ll have to come back for another film to see what precisely that change looks like. In yet another way, then, this Mummy refuses to wrap up.

The Mummy would have been in a better place had it decided what it wanted to be. Is it a Tom Cruise action vehicle? Is it a horror film about ancient evil? Is it an espionage thriller about monster hunters? Or is it an origin story for a shared universe that, quite honestly, not many audiences were requesting in the first place? And although it shares next to nothing except a core concept with 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, this Mummy emerges all the worse for the comparison because of how fluid, energetic, and frankly well-crafted the former Mummy flick was. I still carry fond memories of the 1999 Mummy and wish I’d been watching that film instead. It had a sequel, yes, but it also had a singular plot leading to a singular ending. Rick O’Connell, we hardly knew ye.

(And what does it tell you that, nearly 20 years later, I still remembered Rick’s name but had to look up the name of Tom Cruise’s character a scant day later?)

The Mummy is rated PG-13 for “violence, action and scary images, and for some suggestive content and partial nudity.” Directed by Alex Kurtzman. Written by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman, John Spaihts, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet. Starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, and Russell Crowe.