It used to be the case that a film described as resembling a music video was considered to be cutting-edge, aesthetically speaking. Now that the era of the music video has come and gone, the music video look is positively retro.
Atomic Blonde exists to embrace this aesthetic, from which it mines plenty of superficial entertainment value.
Employing a structure heavily reminiscent of Kiwi director Roger Donaldson's 1987 semi-classic No Way Out, the story is told in flashback as British secret agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Thereon) debriefs her superiors following an especially tumultuous mission in East and West Berlin in the days leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The city's bubbling tensions make for an effective backdrop to the spy games, but the setting's main impact is felt in how well it correlates with the era-appropriate style that Atomic Blonde leans so heavily into. Gun-metal greys and soft blues permeate the screen while pitch-perfect music cues enhance the visuals. George Michael's Father Figure is particularly well-deployed.
Thereon is drop-dead awesome as an ass-kicking female agent, who more than lives up to the informal nickname Atomic Blonde has acquired: "Jane Wick". That comparison extends to the action choreography, which is consistently weighty and inventive. One bravura sequence has Thereon successively taking on a dozen henchmen as she fights her way down several flights of stairs, and it all appears to take place in one amazing tracking shot.
