What If Your Empowerment Fantasy Wasn’t That Empowering?

The Rhythm Section is the answer, for better and worse.

Reed Morano’s The Rhythm Section is an example of the empowerment spy movie—films like the Bourne series or Mr. and Mrs. Smith or The Long Kiss Goodnight in which some ordinary someone who could be you turns out (via deception or amnesia) to have a secret identity as a super competent spy. Ordinary person then goes off and wreaks havoc/vengeance in cool super competent ways, and you get to feel like maybe you could be that empowered competent person, at least for the length of the movie.

The trick with The Rhythm Section, though, is that our hero Stephanie (Blake Lively) isn’t hypercompetent; she’s barely scraping by. The empowerment fantasy is less empowering, but also less fantastical. In theory, that might make it easier to identify with Stephanie, and easier to feel yourself in her place. In practice—well, Rotten Tomatoes’ 28% fresh score speaks for itself.

So, who is Stephanie? She starts out the film, per the genre, as an ordinary middle-class Oxford student with great hopes ahead of her. Then her entire family dies in a plane crash, and she spirals into despair, drugs, and prostitution. Three years later, a reporter named Proctor (Raza Jaffrey) contacts her and tells her that the plane was bombed by a radical Islamist regime. They wanted to kill a single dissident reformer on the flight; Stephanie’s parents were just collateral damage.

Stephanie immediately sets off to get revenge, but can’t pull the trigger, and compromises Proctor, who is quickly murdered. After that major fuck up, she manages to track down Proctor’s contact, ex-MI6 agent, Boyd (Jude Law), and he agrees to train her. She does get into better shape and learns how to shoot a gun, but Boyd warns her she’s never going to be a hand-to-hand combat threat or a superspy. “You’ll still be you,” he says.

And so she is. Boyd helps her identify various people involved in the bombing, and in the course of going after them, she does a lot of typical spy movie things. There are firefights, there’s a car chase, there are hand-to-hand fights, there are seductions.

But Boyd is not what you’d call good at any of them. A guy who’s virtually bed-ridden knocks away her gun and just about kills her. She panics and runs away before the seduction even really starts. The car chase is a bumbling nightmare; she screams in terror as she almost runs people down or runs off the road.

Morano keeps the camera mostly low down and in the action; you can hear Stephanie’s ragged breathing and watch her stumble and scramble and try to get her bearings. Where Jason Bourne films are all clean lines and decisive power moves, this is a sweaty, miserable stagger. The fight choreography is less choreography than rolling around and bumping into things while screaming. Stephanie isn’t the best at what she does. She’s just determined, lucky, and, somehow, good enough.

Morano is very aware she’s messing with the genre; she practically tells you so directly. For the second half of the film, Stephanie pretends to be an assassin named Petra—a woman who is in fact the superspy that Stephanie wishes she were, and that Hollywood would usually want her to be. Petra is cold, ruthless, emotionless, efficient. She wouldn’t go to kill some guy then lock herself in the bathroom and chicken out. She’d know when the target had security and she’d figure out a getaway plan that wasn’t just “run away screaming.” But Petra’s dead. Stephanie, the non-superspy, is all we’ve got.

Again, the vast majority of viewers are also not superspies. If you and I were forced to suddenly become assassins, we’d no doubt struggle at least as much as Stephanie, and probably more. The Rhythm Section is giving you, a more realistic assassin to identify with; it’s offering you a chance to imagine yourself as still you, but just slightly more determined and in somewhat better shape.

You’d think some people would find this scrappier, more plausible vision of empowerment appealing. And in a different context, maybe some would. The problem is that, in her effort to rub your nose in the nitty gritty scruffiness of it all, Morano has made a film that is just not very fun.

The problems start early; Rhythm Section festers in Stephanie’s degradation and inadequacy for a good third of its run time before she starts to win even small victories. That might be forgivable if the script actually tangled with grief in some way, or if the plot was interesting or innovative in a way that provided a payoff for the refusal or distortion of genre pleasures.

But Stephanie’s trauma never takes on much real depth or nuance, and the bad guys are equally default—not least in that many of them are brown and Black. Colonial dynamics are common in spy films, but that doesn’t exactly make it okay to have a film built around a virtuous white woman murdering a bunch of people of color while we’re supposed to cheer.

Morano and Lively are to be commended for finding an original approach to genre material and defying audience expectations. The defiance is all style though, and isn’t backed up with interesting character, plot, or theme. As a result, watching The Rhythm Section often feels like Morano is rubbing your nose in unpleasantness just to fuck with you. It’s an odd film with a distinct vision and an impressive visual sense, and I do think it’s worth watching. I can understand why a lot of people don’t, though.