Cold War spy thriller Atomic Blonde takes an age to hit top gear but, once it does, you'll be glad you stuck around

Blonde fury: Theron wreaks havoc in East Berlin as MI6 agent Broughton

Ratings guide:  WWWW - Wonderful  WWW - Worthwhile  WW - Watchable  W - Woeful

Please note: This review contains mild spoilers

Atomic Blonde

Director: David Leitch

Starring: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman

Running time: 1hr 55mins

There's an extended action sequence just over halfway through that lights up Cold War spy caper Atomic Blonde like a Christmas tree. Charlize Theron's MI6 ice queen is in East Berlin trying to protect a wounded defector ("Spyglass", played by Eddie Marsan) from crack KGB agents and the resulting staircase battle – plus a cracking car chase that seamlessly follows it – are brutal and merciless. The brawl (either shot in one take or 'Birdmanned' with clever edits) is fought with guns, knives, fists, feet and, in one wince-inducing moment, a heavy-duty portable hot plate. Theron cracks it onto the shins of one of her assailants with the kind of blunt force Shahid Afridi used to reserve for hitting sixes. The bone-crunching violence is just as you'd expect from director David Leitch, a former stuntman and stunt co-ordinator, who directed parts of John Wick (shall we guess which ones?). It ends with Theron and Marsan in a fast-sinking car in Berlin's River Spree, as a film that is slow out of the blocks finally finds its feet, then makes an impressive dash for the finish line to grab, if not gold, certainly a commendable silver.

It's 1989 and a very bruised and battered Lorraine Broughton (Theron) is being debriefed in London by her MI6 boss Eric Gray (Toby Jones) and his CIA counterpart Emmett Kurzfeld (John Goodman). She is newly returned from East Berlin – just days after the collapse of the Wall – where her mission to find a highly-incriminating who's who of western spies, concealed in a wristwatch, has seemingly gone horribly wrong. We're told the list is so incendiary it could extend the Cold War by 40 years, and witness her mission go south in flashback. Broughton was "made" by KGB agents as soon as she entered the city and spent practically her entire time there fighting to stay alive, her only support coming from the mercurial head of MI6's Berlin desk, David Percival (James McAvoy), and Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella), an inexperienced member of the French secret service. The list in the wristwatch has been stolen but Spyglass has been able to memorise the entire thing, and must now be smuggled through Checkpoint Charlie to the west. As Broughton recounts her tale of woe, the twists start to mount, enough of them, in fact, to give Chubby Checker an aneurysm. 

The first half of this graphic novel adaptation clunks and clanks like a clapped-out Trabant as Leitch and his screenwriter Kurt Johnstad take a little too long to set everything up, preferring instead to show us over and over how edgy their movie is with a symphony of swearing, sex, violence and artful, lingering shots of Theron's buffed-up body. There's lots of exposition flying around, a couple of punch-ups which turn out to be little more than amuse-bouche for the main event outlined above, and a distracting '80s soundtrack that couldn't be more "on the nose" if it was a pair of spectacles (Re-Flex's The Politics Of Dancing plays in a nightclub because people are, um, dancing and the fall of communism is all political and stuff).

The biggest problem in Atomic Blonde's first hour, though, is Broughton herself. Theron is as game as ever but she's playing someone who is pretty much unknowable – a blank canvass – which might be perfect for a spy but is a bit less interesting if you're a character in a movie that you want people to engage with. In place of a personality, she instead struts around in sunglasses, looking haughty, punching the occasional central-casting communist and having unconvincing sex with Boutella. Leitch and Co are keeping their cards close to their chests because there's a lot they don't want us to know about her – not quite yet anyway. As a result, that first hour or so is sure to work better on a second viewing (once you see how the rest of the film plays out) but its lack of substance and studied trashiness doesn't make it any easier to wade through first time round.

Spy hard: Director Leitch provides action and thrills aplenty

Initially, then, you have to rely on Percival's geezerish charms to nurse the film along. McAvoy has taken on a lot of cartoonish roles in cartoonish movies over the last few years, and I don't know whether his MI6 man has any more genuine depth than Professor Charles Xavier (in the X-Men films), bent copper Bruce (in Filth) or any of the characters he plays in M Night Shyamalan's likeably silly Split, but he's certainly good value here. Because of the twisty plot's diktats, he's in many ways every bit as opaque as Broughton but a lot better written. In fact, Percival doesn't feel like someone from the glum late '80s at all but more a product of the 'have a good time all the time', laddish Loaded '90s – one part Arthur Daley, one part Liam Gallagher, his flat full of contraband goods, as he swaggers drunkenly around Berlin like he owns the place. He's a hoot, in other words, although, like everyone else in the movie, trusting anything he says or does is not an option.  

Percival's grip on Atomic Blonde only recedes once the staircase sequence sparks the film into nose-breaking, shin-splintering life, and everything finally starts to click satisfyingly into place. (They are very different films but the notorious "finger scene" in Julia Ducournau's Raw provides a similar function, lighting the blue touch paper on the movie's faster-paced, stronger second half). Leitch puts you on the back foot almost constantly from hereon in, as definitions of good, bad, right, wrong, east and west become increasingly tricky to get a handle on. The curves, zigzags and fake-outs grow ever more outrageous as the body count rises, in a giddy, gutsy finale that leaves you guessing right up to its sucker-punch denouement. 

Atomic Blonde is a somewhat schizophrenic film, capable of being head-scratchingly dumb – exemplified by a bit in which The Clash's London Calling begins on the soundtrack just before we cut to, um, Paris – but also smart enough to get a little bit meta now and again. There's an extended nod to Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (a 1979 sci-fi classic that imagines a world analogous to Cold War-era East and West Berlin), while a seemingly throwaway line about music sampling sees Leitch acknowledging his movie's magpie tendencies. No Way Out and De Palma's Mission: Impossible, as well as a wealth of British spy fiction, from Le Carré and Fleming down, are clearly visible in its DNA but, if Atomic Blonde isn't the most original or consistent film you'll see all year, it at least delivers one of 2017's most inventive and visceral action set-pieces, as well as an ending both ingenious and wholly satisfying.  

Rating: WWW

Atomic Blonde is in UK cinemas now

Amazing stunts and eye-popping visuals make Mad Max: Fury Road the year’s first must-see blockbuster

Review

Mad Max: Fury Road
Director: George Miller
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult
Running time: 120 mins

The first Mad Max film since 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome (all together now: “We don’t need another heeerrrooo…”) is, essentially, a two-hour chase, albeit a visually stunning, incredibly imaginative one, with jaw-dropping stunt work and some impressive world building. It only has two settings – very fast and very loud – going all the way up to 11 from the get go… and staying there.

In an oil-depleted, radiation-ruined future dystopia, Hardy is Max Rockatansky, the tough but taciturn Road Warrior character originally played by Mel Gibson all those years ago. He is captured by the War Boys, soldiers loyal to Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne – Toecutter in 1979’s first film), a fearsome warlord who “owns” the local water supply and uses that fact to keep his downtrodden subjects fearful and supine.

Max escapes and makes common cause with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a one-armed badass who has betrayed Joe, stolen his gargantuan “war rig” and struck out for the “Green Place”, a land of plenty that supposedly exists somewhere beyond the rad-ravaged wasteland. To enrage him further, Furiosa has liberated Joe’s five “wives” – one of whom is heavily pregnant with his child. He – and a bizarre army of ne’er do wells – gives chase.

Those who know their British comic-books will immediately recognise Brendan McCarthy’s twisted imagination at play in every frame here. Whether he was drawing Spider-Man, Judge Dredd, Paradax or Freakwave, the movie’s co-writer and chief visionary always had an uncanny ability to bring the weird in a way few other artists could match. That sensibility looms large in Fury Road, creating a world that you wouldn’t want to visit but one that is beautifully-realised and easy to believe in. You can practically feel the desert heat on your face and the sand and dirt under your fingernails.

The trucks, cars, motorbikes and armoured vehicles on display are particularly impressive, all battered black chrome, steel porcupine spikes and multiple, oil-dripping exhausts – the old Wacky Races cartoon show reimagined by the Marquis de Sade. Meanwhile, Immortan Joe and his men – big on leather, skulls and scarification – look like the moshpit at a GWAR gig. Joe’s mad convoy even includes synchronised drummers and a guitarist complete with an instrument that shoots flames out of its neck.

If the visuals are impressive, the stunt work is even better. The most thrilling sequence sees the war rig under siege from assailants on long poles attached to fast-moving vehicles. These so-called “Pole Cats” swoop down to attack or carry off their victims, while Max, Nux and their team-mates try desperately to fight them off and outrun them. It is ridiculously exciting and head-spinningly OTT; probably the best blockbuster action scene I’ve witnessed in a very long time. How Miller will go about upping the ante for Mad Max 5 is anyone’s guess.

CGI is kept to a minimum but when it is used it is used expertly. There’s a scene early on when Furiosa steers the war rig into a colossal sand storm quickly followed by their pursuers. Once inside, we see the maelstrom in all its nightmarish, psychedelic glory as numerous vehicles are pulverised by the brutal winds and lightning, hapless passengers smashed, bashed and hurled through the air like rag dolls. Another bravura segment.

Much has been made of the fact Theron’s Furiosa, rather than Max, is actually the film’s main character, to which the only right and proper reaction is surely so what? The Mad Max franchise was always more about the world than the man – teetering on the brink of apocalypse in 1979’s debut, gone fully to hell by the time Thunderdome rolled around six years later. Max – a fairly generic badass/avenger made more interesting than he really was by Mel Gibson’s intensity and charisma – was never the highlight of these films. So the idea a fairly limited character has had to shove over and cede someone else the limelight isn’t one that should worry anyone… anyone sane that is.

If there is anything more worthless and depressing in 2015 than all this “men’s rights” nonsense I’ve yet to see it. It isn’t even as if there aren’t precedents for main characters being little more than co-stars in their own films. Wesley Snipes was upstaged by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biels’ Night Stalkers in Blade Trinity, while Michael Keaton was pretty much a guest star in Batman Returns as Tim Burton concentrated on Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) and The Penguin (Danny DeVito). When Godzilla only appeared for 11 minutes in last year’s Gareth Edwards-directed blockbuster I don’t remember any “Big Lizard” rights groups sobbing into their neck beards about it.

To hear some of these “menanist” mentalists go on, you’d think Fury Road starred Andrea Dworkin and boasted a script based on Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto. So let’s get some perspective here. Like a thousand other action-adventure films, it features goodies and baddies. The only difference is that, for once, the vast majority of the goodies are women (except Max, and Nux, the War Boy played by Nicholas Hoult) and most of the bad guys are… well, guys. Yes, there’s a patriarchal element to Immortan Joe’s Citadel society (conventionally attractive women are used for breeding purposes, while others are “milked” to provide sustenance), but women’s bodies aren’t the only things Joe seeks to control. Like most dictators he also regulates resources (water, oil), access and information, and the underclass he lords it over is made up of both men and women. So, while Fury Road is certainly a movie with sound feminist credentials, it’s hardly Thelma and Louise.

Besides Furiosa is a terrific character – a kind of post-apocalyptic Ellen Ripley. Brave, resourceful and a true survivor, she clearly has a fascinating backstory that I hope Miller, McCarthy and Co delve into in future instalments.

Hardy is a solid, charismatic action hero who has Max's thousand-yard stare down pat. But I prefer him in smaller, low-key films – Locke and The Drop being two recent examples – where he is gifted the time and space to really delve into whichever character he is playing. He isn’t given that luxury here or even a lot to do, apart from run from and fight off War Boys while suffering painful flashbacks to the death of a young girl (his daughter?). He’s rocking a very strange, almost Bane-esque, accent, too.

Two hours is an awful long time to sustain a cat and mouse chase but director Miller – whose credits since Thunderdome have included The Witches of Eastwick, Babe: Pig in the City and the two Happy Feet movies – just about gets away with it. The 70-year-old keeps those blood-pumping set-pieces coming thick and fast, while making sure our protagonists never loiter in one place for long. It’s exuberant, hi-octane and completely barking bloody mad. Yes, the actual plot errs on the thin side but that simplicity is perhaps something to cherish after the overstuffed antics of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Unlike Joss Whedon’s unwieldy sequel, Fury Road’s sturm und drang never once becomes a sturm und drag.

Rating: WWWW

Mad Max: Fury Road is in cinemas now

Ratings

WWWW = Wonderful
WWW = Worthwhile
WW = Watchable
W = Woeful