- UK release: August 2017
- Director: David Leitch · Writer: Kurt Johnstad
- Studio / distributor: Focus Features; Universal; 87Eleven; Denver and Delilah Productions
- Genre: Cold War spy action thriller · Runtime: 115 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Source: Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart
- Main cast: Charlize Theron (Monster, Mad Max: Fury Road) as Lorraine Broughton; James McAvoy (Atonement, X-Men: First Class) as David Percival; Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service) as Delphine Lasalle; Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) as Eric Gray
- IMDb: 6.7 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 78% critics / 64% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
David Leitch spent years as a stunt man and stunt coordinator before he co-directed John Wick and showed everyone what a fight scene could look like when the people staging it actually understand bodies in motion. Atomic Blonde is his first solo feature, and it carries that pedigree on its sleeve. This is a spy film made by an action choreographer, set in the last weeks before the Berlin Wall comes down, and shot as though the late eighties were a colour palette rather than a decade. The question hanging over it is whether a man who built his name on movement can also hold a Cold War plot together. The answer is roughly half and half, and the half that works is glorious.
The setup
Berlin, November 1989. The Wall is days from falling, every intelligence service in the city is scrambling, and a list has surfaced that names every active field agent on both sides. An MI6 officer carrying it has just been killed. London sends Lorraine Broughton, a top agent with a reputation for getting results and leaving bodies, to recover the list and to find the double agent, code-named Satchel, who has been bleeding British secrets for years. Her only contact in Berlin is David Percival, the station chief who has gone thoroughly native, and whose loyalties are a question rather than a given.
The film frames all this as a debrief: a bruised, chain-smoking Lorraine recounting the mission to her superiors, which lets the story double back on itself and keep you guessing who played whom. Keep your wits about you and avoid reading too much ahead; the pleasure here is in not quite knowing who is lying.
The cast
Charlize Theron is the reason this works. She trained hard for the role and it shows in every frame, but the performance is more than physical competence. Lorraine is all icy control on the surface and exhaustion underneath, and Theron lets you see the cost of the violence rather than just the elegance of it. After Mad Max: Fury Road nobody doubted she could carry an action film; here she does it in heels and a white coat, and she sells the fights as someone who gets hurt.
James McAvoy is having an enormous amount of fun as Percival, a man who has been in Berlin too long and stopped pretending he is on anyone’s side but his own. He brings the chaos the cool surface needs. Sofia Boutella, fresh from Kingsman: The Secret Service, plays a green French agent who becomes Lorraine’s lover, and the relationship gives the film its only real warmth. Toby Jones and John Goodman, as the British and American spymasters running the debrief, supply the dry institutional scepticism, and Jones in particular knows this territory from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
The craft
The craft is where the film earns its keep. Jonathan Sela’s cinematography drenches everything in cold blues, sodium oranges and neon pink, and the production design treats divided Berlin as a stage set of graffiti, surveillance and cheap hotel rooms. The soundtrack is a jukebox of period hits, New Order, Depeche Mode, David Bowie, Nena, and Leitch cuts the action to them with real wit.
Then there is the stairwell. A single long take, stitched to look unbroken, that follows Lorraine through a brutal close-quarters fight down several floors of a tenement, both combatants slowing, stumbling and gasping as the exhaustion sets in. It is the best action sequence of the year and one of the best of the decade, precisely because it refuses to make the violence look easy. People tire. Weapons run out. It hurts. After years of weightless cutting, this is what choreography looks like when a stunt man is in charge.
How it stacks up
The obvious sibling is John Wick, Leitch’s calling card, and the lineage of clean, legible, bone-crunching action runs straight through both. But Atomic Blonde is reaching for something the Wick films never bother with: the moral murk of the spy genre. It wants to sit alongside Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the colder end of the Cold War tradition, all betrayal and ambiguity, while moving with the velocity of The Bourne Identity. It does not fully manage the synthesis. The plot is deliberately tangled, and by the time the double and triple crosses resolve, the espionage feels more like a delivery system for set pieces than a story you are gripped by. Salt had the same problem and less style to cover it.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have come down warmer than audiences, around 78% against 64%, and the split makes sense. Reviewers have fallen for the look, the soundtrack and that stairwell, while flagging that the narrative is colder and more convoluted than it needs to be. Audiences seem to have walked in expecting a straightforward action thriller and found a knotty spy puzzle wrapped around it. Both reactions are fair. I land closer to the critics, because the things this film does superbly are the things I most enjoy, and the thing it fumbles, a slightly over-engineered plot, is one I can forgive when the surface is this good.
Verdict
Judge it as the espionage drama it half wants to be and it comes up short; the plotting is too pleased with its own reversals. Judge it as a stylish, ferociously well-staged action thriller with espionage trimmings and a once-in-a-decade fight scene, and it is one of the most purely enjoyable films of the year. The atmosphere, the soundtrack and Theron’s control of the whole thing make it eminently rewatchable, and that stairwell alone is worth the ticket. The story does not survive close inspection, but the craft does, repeatedly. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now. One for the biggest screen and the loudest sound system you can find.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Leitch went on to direct Deadpool 2 and Bullet Train, confirming him as one of the most reliable action stylists working, though a true Atomic Blonde sequel never materialised despite Theron’s interest. The film has settled into a cult standing built largely on the stairwell sequence, regularly cited among the best action set pieces of its era. It is now widely available on disc and digital and rotates through streaming services, including Netflix in some regions.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong violence, very strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent scenes of strong violence. These include people being shot, resulting in large spurts of blood into the air or onto walls. People are also stabbed with ice picks and keys. There are extended sequences of hand-to-hand combat featuring heavy punches and kicks delivered to faces and bodies, leaving people heavily bloodied in the aftermath.
Language: There is infrequent very strong language (‘c**t’). Strong language (‘c**ksucker’ and ‘f**k’) is frequent. Other bad language includes ‘prick’, ‘buggered’, ‘bastard’, ‘balls’, ‘bollocks’, ‘crap’, ‘arse’ and ‘God’.
Additional issues: Other issues include female breast nudity - both natural, during bathing, and in a sexual context as two women make love. There are also verbal sex references including comments about whiskey being from the ‘tit’ of the Virgin Mary and how a man’s ‘balls’ are impressive.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
