Reed Morano - Finding Her Rhythm

Reed Morano reinvents the British spy thriller.

- Paul Wils

A film’s ‘title drop’, when a character speaks the name of the movie as part of the dialogue, usually has audience members grinning (or groaning) in recognition. The Rhythm Section, however, has one that gets you moving to the music of your insides. Jude Law is on title-dropping duty, as his former MI6 operative Boyd—that’s Boyd, not Bond—explains to would-be assassin Stephanie Patrick, played by Blake Lively, that to fire her gun accurately she must first control her body’s rhythm section, to think of the heart as the drums and breathing as the bass.

Esquire’s man, rapt in row B of Paramount Pictures’ London screening room, could not help but retune his internal percussion on Law’s instruction, and achieved an unexpected moment of Zen, along with Lively on screen. Several other sequences in the film turbocharge your cardiovascular system in more traditional action-movie ways: a punishing knife fight in the kitchen of a Scottish cottage, seemingly done in one take; another ‘oner’, a car chase on the streets of Tangier, with a genuine sense of peril; and the frantic tackling of armed terrorists on a packed tourist bus in Marseille.

As it trots the globe, avoiding spy-saga cliché and introducing a very modern hero, The Rhythm Section hits all the right notes. Lively is outstanding in the lead and her British accent is flawless. The film’s co-producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have performed a similar role together on the most recent nine Bond movies, including the forthcoming No Time To Die. So, since the Bond-makers now have a female cinematic secret agent, who needs a woman as 007?