Charlize Theron first appears onscreen in her mostly terrific new action thriller, Atomic Blonde, trying to heal her wounded body in an ice bath. She has bruises all over her back. Her face is swollen, one of her eyes blackened. She pulls herself out of the tub, dresses laboriously, and limps into the headquarters of MI6 in London for an interrogation that will, in part, address the question: How did she, a superspy, get herself beaten to a pulp?
The answer is contained within this jigsaw puzzle of a movie, whose screenplay (by Kurt Johnstad, based on a graphic novel) cleverly withholds information from us to mimic Theron’s experience of being an intelligence officer dropped in the middle of a situation she does not entirely understand.
The setting is Berlin in the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The thing every spy in the city wants—the Brits, the French, the East Germans, the Russians—is a master list of all British intelligence assets. There are two copies. One is contained inside a watch. The other is contained within the brain of an East German officer called Spyglass, who memorized it. Theron has been sent to Berlin after the murder of a fellow officer who was secretly her beloved. She is told by her superiors that the MI6 station chief (James McAvoy) has “gone native” and is no longer trustworthy. From the moment she lands in Berlin she is everyone’s target.
So, yes, she gets beaten up, but she gives far worse than she gets. The movie’s able director David Leitch co-helmed the Keanu Reeves revenge thriller John Wick, and what he did there pales in comparison with what he pulls off here. He choreographs several jaw-dropping hand-to-hand fight scenes in which Theron is so convincingly savage that she basically sends Reeves (with whom she co-starred a couple of times when he was the bigger Hollywood draw) down to the minors.
Leitch begins the movie with a bruised and damaged Theron because, I think, he figured it might lead us to have some empathy or common feeling for her. It does help, for the reason that Theron is unique among the very best actresses of our time in a very odd way. Simply put, she’s just too good-looking.
Theron is one of the great camera subjects in the history of film. That’s why she had to uglify herself to win an Oscar (playing the homely and overweight serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the 2003 film Monster). Otherwise she’s so preposterously beautiful she hardly seems like an actual human being. That’s why, for her role as the avenging angel Furiosa in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, writer-director George Miller saw to it Theron was dirtied up and disfigured, with half an arm cut off.
It’s not that Theron can’t play vulnerable. She was sensational in 1997’s The Devil’s Advocate as Keanu Reeves’s fun-loving Southern-belle wife slowly going insane when she is forced to live among the damned spouses in an apartment building entirely inhabited by the associates at Satan’s law firm. (If you don’t understand that sentence, go see the movie.) And she has comedy chops, too; she was a delight in the strange Seth MacFarlane Western parody, A Million Ways to Die in the West. When she smiles, a charming goofiness comes over her.
But at rest her face is a portrait of iciness. And she plays guarded and chilly women like nobody else ever. She gave a magnificent performance in a neglected little movie called Young Adult as a solipsistic failed novelist who goes back to her hometown and decides to break up the happy marriage of her nice and extremely dull high school boyfriend.
Atomic Blonde plays too many games with its timeline, so that by the time it reaches its climax you’ve actually lost the thread of who’s betraying whom for what reason. And there’s a wholly unnecessary subplot about a lesbian relationship that provides titillation but nothing else. But just when you think the movie has ended badly, it springs back to life with a couple of unexpected and satisfying final scenes.
There are good supporting turns here and there, but the movie is Theron, and if anything, it’s too modestly named. Atomic Blonde? How about Thermonuclear Blonde?
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
