The Rhythm Section Parent Guide

Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) is a promising young woman at the top of her class in university. She’s got her a bright future ahead of her, until her entire family dies in a tragic plane crash. Stephanie collapses and her life goes into a downward spiral until she finds herself addicted to heroin and working as a prostitute. Her rock bottom existence is shaken up when a reporter, Keith Proctor (Raza Jaffrey), arrives at the brothel with the information that the plane didn’t simply crash - it was bombed. Now set on revenge, Stephanie follows Proctor’s contacts until she finds the mysterious MI6 agent known as B (Jude Law), who gives her the training she needs to accomplish her goal…

This is a very paint-by-numbers revenge/spy thriller. Basically, if you watched 2019’s Anna and 2016’s Jason Bourne (easily the worst in its otherwise excellent franchise) simultaneously, you’d have most of the movie. The soundtrack is equally unoriginal, with Hans Zimmer bringing out a dulled mixtape of tracks from other films he’s worked on. None of it is incompetent, it’s just unoriginal and lazy. Blake Lively, on the other hand, is fantastically watchable and makes the movie a lot more tolerable as a result. Her character and her performance are easily the best part of this nearly two-hour cliché fest.

There are a lot of content issues here, but given that they occur in an R-rated spy thriller, they are contextually understandable. Sure, there are depictions of prostitution and hard drug use, but they are not detailed and illustrate a low point in the protagonist’s life and aren’t portrayed as being fun and exciting. The violence is also comparatively mild for a revenge thriller, with most of it happening at the periphery or fully off-screen. (That being said, there are several scenes of hand-to-hand combat, some explosions, and a faith bit of death.) The only gory graphic violence is in a scene of an individual pulling shards of glass out of their hand. The content issues are a bit high for teens, but adult fans of the spy genre might squeeze some enjoyment out of it.

So you could do worse, but you could do a lot better too. This is the kind of movie that I think is okay for bored adults to watch on a plane - or it would be, if the plot didn’t center around a terrorist cell bombing a passenger jet. That’s enough to put your average passenger off the complimentary bag of pretzels and half-can of coke, don’t you think? Well, if that doesn’t do it, the broken glass should.