"Atomic Blonde" is a deliberate 80's throwback piece, set in the days just before the Berlin Wall crumbled, as a tough agent is sent into town to recover a list of agents before chaos engulfs the city and valuable secrets could be up for grabs. Charlize Theron is our tough agent, a cool customer who's a hard-knuckle fighter, with some solid support from John Goodman and Toby Jones as two of her bosses, James McAvoy as a shifty possible ally, and Sophia Boutella as a seductive French agent who may have an agenda all her own.
The action is the reason anybody's here, and ... to be honest, the first couple of action sequences don't really cut it. They're loud, certainly, and have blasting quality 80's tunes in accompaniment, but they all feel a bit by-the motions. The plot for what should be a simple genre piece is convoluted in ways that never quite manage to be particularly interesting - it's very much by the motions. THere is an outstanding centerpiece where the soundtrack largely drops out and we get, in what appears to be a continuous shot, about 7 or 8 minutes of Theron fighting her way through a series of goons to protect an informant - and certainly the film is quite happy to show at least some of the consequences of the violence, with Theron bruised and scarred (although at the intensity she fights, she should probably be having difficultly walking), but all in all this isn't quite as much superspy fun as it should be. There's neither enough depth nor enough glee in the lack of depth to make this quite work.
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