A GHOST STORY
ATOMIC BLONDE
Cert Running time
This brash and sleazy Cold War action thriller is a lace and leather post-punk party for lovers of fetishised violence. It takes a salacious glee in its own stylishly-dressed nastiness and is so busy being screamingly self-aware and cool, it’s indifferent to your viewing pleasure.
After her turns in Mad Max: Fury Road and The Fate of the Furious, Charlize Theron is the ferocious kick-ass queen of Hollywood.
Here she’s a female Jason Bourne in killer heels, suspenders and sunglasses, with an the inventive use for a rubber hose. As toplevel MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton she’s chasing a top secret list of operatives, an ‘atomic bomb’ of information also wanted by the Russians and Americans.
Theron’s in fine fighting form and we see a great deal of her form due to her frequent ice baths, which are evidently very cold indeed.
There’s a brutal, terrifically well choreographed and prolonged fight which begins in a stairwell. Such a shame the rest of the film doesn’t come close for ambition or intensity.
A deliciously feral James McAvoy co-stars as MI6’s Berlin agent David Percival, and Toby Jones and John Goodman don’t break a sweat as the suits back in London. Also, for what it’s worth, love interest Sofia Boutella is much better than she was in The Mummy.
Set to the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, all the counter espionage stuff seems somewhat moot. It just uses the period setting as wallpaper and is a useful way for the scriptwriters to avoid having to deal with the internet.
Meanwhile, the dialogue is functional and the humour is off target. Beneath the surface sheen and synth soundtrack there’s little to make us care about this Atomic Blonde, as it’s never sufficiently explosive or electrifying. Cert Running time
This supernatural melodrama sees Best Actor Oscar-winner Casey Affleck hiding the light of his talent not under a bushel, but under a bed sheet.
He is at his most furrowed and mumbling even before his character suffers an early death. The actor spends most of the movie hidden in the classic kids’ costume of a bedsheet with two holes cut out and not saying a word.
Occasional moments of black humour break out as Affleck communicates with the ghost next door.
Tastefully somber, this mournful meditation on the meaning of life is almost provocative in its refusal to engage in anything as crowdpleasing as drama.
But as Affleck spends an eon mourning for his lost love played by Rooney Mara, I began longing for the grubby pleasures of Demi Moore and her potter’s wheel from 1990s weepie, Ghost.
For all the grand cosmic sweep and the literary influences, like its main character there’s not much going on underneath.