I have never been to Berlin. Certainly not in 1989, the year of our film Batman, one of my earliest theater memories. But if I had, and it looked anything like the cold steel blue dreamland David Leitch re-imagined, I would have been both mesmerized and terrified. Berlin, at the height of its pre-wall destruction, is in turn personified by the beauty, style, and perilousness of Charlize Theron’s titular Atomic Blonde. Poised to unravel the mystery at the heart of any spy thriller before the credits, you’d be hard pressed to find time. If you are like me, you spent the entire film in awe of the authentic, heavily stylized sights and sounds that embody the end of the cold war and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That isn’t to say the story isn’t interesting, but it comes in waves. The basic plot being that a spy carrying a special list of double agents is murdered and in effort to recover it, MI6 sends our Atomic Blonde in to ascertain what happened and retrieve the list. The film is framed by the retelling of all the events in a debriefing with MI6 and CIA played to great effect by John Goodman and Toby Jones. In turn, she is to rendezvous with an unorthodox MI6 agent Percival, played by James McAvoy in manic british fashion, and using his connections figure out who’s in play. And, well, the clues are there if you want to follow them, but not in the kind of way where in retrospect you would have been able to figure the whole thing out. It gives you the ‘Ah hah!’ moment by the end, but I felt happy enough paying more attention to the physical detail and cinematography.

The path filmed is dotted with plus action pieces, but by far less than you would imagine. And in between it doesn’t really feel like it makes up for the advertised difference. While its intriguing at its best moments, it still has many lingering shots of Charlize in and out of her clothes making eyes at targets and gathering information. But when she needs to, our Blonde takes on a series of confrontations that would make Schwarzenegger or Van Damme hit the gym in envy.  She dispatches her opponents deftly, but when she gets in trouble, she finds a way to dig deeper. Its an intense experience to watch and all signs of her fights are left all over her body.

While this hasn’t been my favorite film this summer season, it certainly was refreshing. It is a pretty honest spy film. They don’t find ways to make Ms.Blonde enter into fight scenes for no reason and the plot is pretty tight. I left with way less questions than I thought I would have. Though this film focus on style over substance, it’s not so far off balance that you struggle to right its course in your head. My focus may have strayed in between the key story points, but I was glad to see the sights and sounds of Berlin.

~* 8/10 *~