The Rhythm Section

It has been quite a while since my Dad and I went to a late movie so we decided to go last night.  Since we are both big fans of espionage we picked The Rhythm Section and we both enjoyed it.  Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) is a promising student at Oxford when her parents and siblings are killed in a plane crash.  She feels tremendous guilt because she was supposed to be on the plane with them and her life has spiraled out of control.  When she learns that the crash wasn't an accident, she tracks down Iain Boyd (Jude Law), an ex MI-6 agent, to help her find and eliminate the terrorists responsible.  He reluctantly agrees to train her and has her assume the persona of an assassin that he killed.  He sends her to Marc Serra (Sterling K. Brown), an ex CIA agent, to complete several missions which don't go according to plan because she lacks the killing instinct.  She ultimately finds Mohammad Reza (Tawfeek Barhom), the man she believes is responsible, but discovers that there is a much bigger conspiracy.  This movie is very different from what I thought it would be based on the trailers.  It has a very slow start because, when we first meet Stephanie, she is addicted to drugs and has been working as a prostitute.  It takes her a while to make the decision to seek revenge and then, once she does, she spends quite a bit of time training with Boyd (although this involves some very amusing scenes because she is so inept).  When it actually gets going there are some amazing action sequences, including an awesome car chase through the streets of Tangiers and some epic hand-to-hand combat on a bus in Marseilles (I really like the fact that it comes down to hand-to-hand combat in the end because that was Stephanie's biggest weakness in her training with Boyd).  Lively gives a very strong central performance as a woman with nothing left to lose and I liked the stylized cinematography because much of it is from Stephanie’s perspective.  Despite the problems with the pacing, both my Dad and I found it to be very entertaining and I would recommend it to fans of action thrillers.