Atomic Blonde - Hyper violent, Hyper stylised thrill ride

If you have been lucky to watch Charlize Theron in her latest film, Atomic Blonde, which premiered on Friday at Anga IMAX, then you will agree that it is a hyper violent and hyper stylised thrill ride.

In the movie, lifted from Antony Johnston’s graphic novel “The Coldest City”, the heroine comes out as a blank slate of emotionless efficiency and master of cold stares. We watch her emerge nude from an ice bath more than once. The movie was mostly well-reviewed as an action thriller, which stars the South African born star as a kick-ass Cold War-era spy.

Theron plays an MI6 agent who, in 1989 is sent on a mission to retrieve a cache of information that could be embarrassing to Western intelligence. According to critics, a more compelling motive would have been a quest to get those who killed her lover. Mostly, the movie is an excuse to watch a beautiful, deviously clever female as she is stripped naked, dolled up and repeatedly beaten down only to rise again.

One of the best scenes in the movie lasts five minutes and to the magic of movie making it does not contain a single noticeable cut.

According to Variety, the appearance of a one-take sequence is created by seamlessly stitching together nearly 40 separate shots. But even knowing this doesn’t lessen the pulse-pounding, propulsive thrust. You forget to breathe. More importantly, you forget to question the needlessly complicated layers of double-crossing that clog up the third act of an otherwise impressively lean piece of storytelling.

“Wait here,” she says, and proceeds to do battle with waves of henchmen up an elevator, down a staircase, into an apartment, out of the apartment, with a gun, without a gun, with an unloaded gun, with stray bits of furniture, back out into the street, into a car, forward in the car, and then in reverse. That alone is worth the price of admission alone, says Variety.