Charlize Theron spends most of Atomic Blonde getting hit, and the film is better for it. David Leitch’s 2017 action thriller sends her into Berlin in November 1989, days before the Wall comes down, to recover a stolen list of every intelligence agent working the city. The setup is Cold War boilerplate. The execution is not.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
A Microfilm Hidden in a Watch
The plot turns on a document hidden inside a wristwatch. KGB agent Yuri Bakhtin kills MI6 agent James Gascoigne and takes the watch, which holds the names of every active agent in Berlin. Lorraine Broughton, a top-level MI6 field agent played by Theron, is dispatched a day later to get the list back. She is also told to watch for Satchel, a double agent working for the KGB.
That is the whole engine. A list, a watch, a traitor. Kurt Johnstad’s screenplay, based on the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart, keeps the machinery simple and lets the bodies do the talking.
Berlin, Days Before the Wall Falls
The setting is the film’s best asset and its most underused one. Lorraine lands in a city about to stop being two cities. Two men pick her up at the airport; she works out they are KGB and fights her way out of the car after one of them mentions his boss, Aleksander Bremovych.
Her real contact is David Percival, the maverick MI6 station chief in Berlin, played by James McAvoy with a grin that never quite reaches his eyes. Percival is the film’s live wire. He is also, by the end, its most predictable turn.
The Photograph in Gascoigne’s Apartment
Lorraine searches Gascoigne’s apartment and finds a photograph of him with Percival. Percival had already denied knowing Gascoigne. Then West Berlin police ambush her mid-search, and she starts to suspect the man who was supposed to be helping her.
It is a clean piece of plotting, and Leitch stages the suspicion well. The problem is that Atomic Blonde rarely lets a quiet moment breathe. Every scene wants to be the next scene.
Sofia Boutella Interrupts a Meeting
At a restaurant the KGB men mentioned, Lorraine meets Bremovych, played by Roland Møller. The meeting breaks off when Delphine Lasalle, a novice French agent played by Sofia Boutella, interrupts it.
Lorraine is suspicious at first. Then she and Lasalle start a relationship. Lasalle proposes they work together. Boutella gives the film its only real warmth, and the film does not know what to do with it.
Talents can be overrated.
Spyglass Has the List Memorized
Percival tails Lorraine, surveils a watchmaker she visited, and spots Bakhtin. Lorraine is told Satchel’s identity has been compromised. Percival kills Bakhtin, takes the wristwatch, and learns who Satchel is.
Meanwhile Lorraine finds out that Spyglass, the Stasi officer who handed the list to Gascoigne, has memorized it. Eddie Marsan plays Spyglass, and he is the film’s most interesting piece of casting — a nervous man carrying a document in his head. Unaware Percival already has the list, Lorraine plans with him to escort Spyglass to West Berlin.
Percival then meets Bremovych and offers up Satchel’s identity “to keep the balance,” and tips him off about the plan.
The Stairwell Fight
Leitch came to Atomic Blonde from John Wick, where he was an uncredited co-director and producer on the first film. Critics noticed the resemblance, and it is not a lazy comparison. Both films treat violence as choreography, and both trust the audience to keep up.
Atomic Blonde’s centerpiece is a long fight in and around a stairwell, and it is the reason the film exists. The camera stays close. The sequence is bruising and relentless, and the film earns its reputation on that stretch alone.
Cast and Key Facts
- Runtime: 115 minutes
- Released in the United States: July 28, 2017, by Focus Features
- Premiere: South by Southwest, March 12, 2017
- Budget: $30 million
- Worldwide gross: $100 million
- Metacritic: 63/100
Theron also served as a co-producer. The cast includes John Goodman as Emmett Kurzfeld, a senior CIA agent working with MI6; Toby Jones as Eric Gray, Lorraine’s MI6 superior; James Faulkner as Chief “C”; Til Schweiger as the Watchmaker; Bill Skarsgård as Merkel; and Sam Hargrave as Gascoigne. Barbara Sukowa plays the coroner.
A Cold Film That Stays Cold
Atomic Blonde has a coldness problem, and it is not the good kind. The film is set in a city about to be rewritten, and it treats that as wallpaper. The stakes are historical, and the film keeps them at arm’s length.
The ending asks the audience to reconsider what they have watched, and it mostly works on paper. On screen it lands with a shrug, because the film never gave us a version of Lorraine worth being surprised by. Theron is superb. The character is a coat and a set of bruises.
McAvoy has the better part and knows it. His Percival is a man enjoying the last days of a rotten job. When the film reveals what he has been doing, it is not a shock. It is a confirmation.
Atomic Blonde is a good action film wearing a great one’s clothes. The stairwell sequence is genuinely excellent, and the Berlin setting is a gift the film half-wastes. The plot is clean, the cast is deep, and Theron does more with a blank stare than most actors manage with a monologue.
It is also thin. Strip the fights and the needle drops and there is not much holding the thing together. A $100 million gross against a $30 million budget says audiences wanted this. A sequel was in development as of April 2020, which says the industry agreed.
The comparison to John Wick is fair and also the problem. John Wick knew exactly what it was. Atomic Blonde keeps reaching for something heavier and dropping it.
Nine years on, the stairwell is what survives. The rest is a handsome coat with nobody in it.
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