Atomic Blonde: The last days of the Cold War
By
Kevin Martinez
5 August 2017
Directed by David Leitch; written by Kurt Johnstad; based on the graphic novel by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart
Set in 1989 before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Atomic Blonde is an action spy thriller starring Charlize Theron. Lorraine Broughton (Theron) is an MI6 [British foreign intelligence] agent sent to retrieve a secret list hidden in a wristwatch that has the names of every active agent in the Soviet Union. Should it fall into the wrong hands, we are told, it may extend the Cold War “another 40 years.” A fairly ludicrous premise to begin with.
Lorraine is sent to Berlin to retrieve “the list” and eliminate Satchel, a double agent working for the Soviet side who also killed her partner, MI6 agent James Gasciogne (Sam Hargrave). She meets her contact, agent David Percival (James McAvoy), a hedonistic Berlin spy station chief who loves the city’s night life.
She is also joined by Delphine LaSalle (Sofia Boutella), a French agent naively seeking the excitement and intrigue of the espionage world. At the dramatic high point of the film, Lorraine and Percival have to smuggle an East German Stasi (secret police) officer codenamed Spyglass (Eddie Marsan) and his family across the border to West Berlin. Spyglass has memorized the contents of the list and is defecting before the KGB gets to him.
All of this is told in flashbacks by Lorraine to her MI6 handler Eric Gray (Toby Jones) and CIA agent Emmet Kurzfeld (John Goodman). Most of the film, however, is devoted to ambushes, shootings, car chases, hand-to-hand combat and people looking cool and extraordinarily chic in various bars, nightclubs, hotel rooms and so forth.
Since the film takes place in the…