By Susan JAMES

For those fans of revenge porn where cartoon crafting allows guilt-free enjoyment of taking out the bad guy(s), “The Rhythm Section” is for you.

Based on a thriller by Mark Burnell and directed by Reed Morano, the film tells the story of a young British woman named Stephanie Patrick who is on a quest to find and destroy the killers who wiped out her entire family. Be warned: The cast is severely diminished by the movie’s rousing conclusion.

Blake Lively plays the haunted Stephanie, Oxford student, daughter of loving parents, sister to younger siblings David and Sarah. The family has plans to travel to Scotland but changes its flight so Stephanie can join them. Instead she skips out on them, becoming the family’s sole survivor when the plane explodes in mid-air and all on-board are killed. A terrible accident, authorities call it. Racked with guilt, Stephanie goes into a tailspin of drugs, prostitution and self-loathing. She’s all set for her own personal fatal crash when a freelance reporter named Proctor (Raza Jaffrey) shows up at her brothel.

Proctor is looking for clues into the crash. He tells a drugged-out Stephanie that a bomb, not a malfunction, brought down the plane and he knows who the bomb maker is. Why he thinks a drug-addicted hooker can help him find answers is a question the film never really addresses. From the moment she learns the truth and is presented with the opportunity to track down those responsible for her family’s death, Stephanie is on a mission.  Aided and abetted by former MI6 agent suavely named B (Jude Law), Stephanie turns herself into the chameleon assassin she must become to conclude her mission.

“The Rhythm Section” gets its name from the way B trains Stephanie to use a gun with lethal precision. Let your heart be the drums and your breathing the bass. Get the rhythm section in sync and the bullet will follow. That’s the easy part. The hard part, he tells her, is living with it afterward. But in order to get to the afterward, Stephanie must find out why the airplane was targeted and who was responsible for bringing it down.

While searching for answers she meets Alia Kaif, played by Amira Ghazalla, the mother of one of the other passengers. In the midst of a not-really-real thriller, Ghazalla is a high note off in another world playing Medea or Hecuba, the Trojan queen whose children were all killed. The movie pauses around the two brief scenes she’s in as if to say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if she were doing all that revenge stuff?” And indeed it would.

Stephanie’s quest takes her to exotic places: Scotland, Tangiers, Madrid and Marseilles. Director Reed Morano, who came up as a cinematographer, doesn’t spend much time giving us glimpses of the scenery. She has a passion for hand-held camera work that in extended scenes can make you wish you’d brought Dramamine with you for motion sickness. This is especially true of a car chase through the heart of Tangiers with an amped soundtrack of Stephanie grunting, screaming, gasping and gargling beneath a pounding cascade of rhythmic beats. She may be cut; she may be bloody; she may be bruised, but in the end (this after all is the first book of a series), you just know Stephanie is going to get her man (men). 

See you at the movies!

  susan james