Anything Jason Bourne can do, the “Atomic Blonde” can also do, and she does it in heels.
Charlize Theron plays the title character, Lorraine, a spy whose employer (MI6? CIA? KGB?) is not 100 percent clear because it’s not 100 percent clear if she’s a good guy or a bad guy. As the movie opens, she is being debriefed on a bloody mission in Berlin that went down during the week the Berlin Wall fell. It’s all very confusing, but in a series of flashbacks, Lorraine fills in details about efforts to get her hands on one of those secret lists with the identities of undercover agents that people are always so careless about in these spy movies.
I suspect the plot of “Atomic Blonde” doesn’t quite track, but with all the back-and-forth and double-agenting, it’s possible not to notice. Mostly, the movie is an excuse for a ton of stunt sequences that are shot almost like dance numbers in a musical. In many of them, director David Leitch creates the illusion that we’re seeing the action in long, uninterrupted takes, in which Lorraine and whoever’s head she is busting move and bleed according to ultra-precise choreography. It’s impressive stuff, and Leitch goes himself one better in a sequence that takes place in a car, with Lorraine and a source racing through the streets of Berlin while a dozen different people shoot at them or try to ram them with vehicles. Wittily, Leitch uses the car windows to create frames-within-frames, so it’s almost like what we’re seeing through the windows of Lorraine’s car is a movie-within-the-movie.
It’s a good thing Leitch’s work is so stylish and energetic because, other than that and Theron’s authoritatively bruised performance, there’s little in “Atomic Blonde” to distinguish it from dozens of other movies where it’s so unclear who is on whose side that you stop caring. That happened for me by the end of “Atomic Blonde,” but fortunately, the mayhem along the way is so dazzling to look at that it didn’t matter.
