Atomic Blonde - David Leitch (2017)

Violence, violence, violence, sweet bloody, graphic, unnecessary, creative violence!

It's been absent from our action films for too long. Remember when bad guys were killed over and over until you didn't think there could possibly be any bad guys left? It was awesome. But nowadays, everybody shoots for that PG-13 rating. Even the last two Die Hard movies were PG-13. And when they do release an R-rated film, even those are watered down.

From Batman to the Avengers to even John McLane in recent years, the good guys nowadays refuse to spill blood. And I'm all for that in real life. In real life, for God's sake, everybody restrain yourselves. But what I want out of action movies is bodies. I want protagonists like Riggs, not Murtaughs! (Even Murtaugh was willing to spill his share of blood. "No way you live. No way.") You know, when the bad guys can't shoot at all but every good guy is like the greatest shot ever, taking out thug after thug after thug? Ah, the amorality. I miss those days.

Well those days are back with a vengeance with David Leitch's "Atomic Blonde."

We are blessed with one of those wonderful good guys in Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) who, as a side note, could easily kick Detective Riggs' or John McClane's asses. She could even take on Ichi the Killer.

From the start, Leitch presents Lorraine as invincible. We just know that nobody is ever going to be able to kill this agent.

Lorraine is an undercover MI6 agent sent to retrieve very sensitive information against the backdrop of the week when the Berlin wall falls. The cold war may be coming to an end, but behind the scenes, intelligence agencies are still undermining their foes. What, did we expect trust between our superpowers to come immediately?

Lorraine is sent to investigate the murder of another agent and track down a list that will expose double agents and puts everybody in the Western intelligence community at risk.

Her superiors warn her not to trust anybody and send her off to Berlin. When she arrives, she meets her contact in a charming and violent car chase sequence.

Her contact is Percival, (James McAvoy) an agent already embedded in the area. It is hard to tell at first if he is a devil-may-care kind of nonchalant guy or if he is just reckless. As the pair of them start hunting down the list, Percival gives Lorraine cause to doubt him from the start.

She meets French intelligence agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella) who is simply way over her head. This is her first assignment and it is clear to Lorraine that she does not yet have the cunning for a mission as convoluted as this one.

Percival traces down a man who has the list, or at least has it committed to memory. Now the goal is to get him out of Berlin and onto Western soil.

Betrayal comes fast and hard early and the story turns in so many ways that we are dizzy by the spinning.

The fun is seeing Lorraine caught into trap after trap and overcoming every single hurdle thrown her way. She uses any weapon she can find including pots and pans, a freezer door, loose rope laying around, stiletto heels and so many other objects one can not keep count. She is a talented and versatile killer. She can shoot, she beats her enemies to death, she stages car crashes designed to kill a single man, and of course, she can just stab the hell out of anybody.

Leitch treats this film like an insane body cam video. He delights in staging fight sequences that play out without cuts. It is like a collaboration between Jim Jarmusch and John Woo. "Atomic Blonde" definitely makes action movies fun again. Think the Bourne movies and a rock of crack having a love baby.

When the movie ended and the lights came up, I felt satisfied, just like one feels after having visited a Brazilian Steakhouse.

So indulge yourself. Watch and just enjoy the violence.

It's like witnessing a moment of cool in film history.