It's Hard to be a Gentleman and Still Prefer Atomic Blonde

It's tempting to say that I liked the 2017 movie Atomic Blonde movie much better when it was called No Way Out but then I remember that many of the things I most hated about that 1987 movie -- the arbitrary death of a female character, the pointless twist ending, etc, -- were the same things I hated about this movie.

It did not help that I saw Salt soon after I saw this flick. As tempted as I was to quibble about various plot points in that movie, I still liked that movie better than Atomic Blonde -- and for good reason. It was the "Cold War" thriller that Atomic Blonde should have been but wasn't.

Anyway, I can see why so many critics were so disappointed in this movie. I expected more from it myself -- and now I feel foolish for doing so. Oh, well.

Charlize Theron put on a game performance but in the end, the movie didn't exactly go through new territory. When it was not borrowing from No Way Out, it was borrowing from movies like The World Was Not Enough. The most novel part of the movie was the revelation that Ms. Theron's character was bisexual. Yet it said something about this movie that as nice as the scenes between Theron and her female lover were, it did not change the fact that the rest of the movie was all too predictable. (And as other critics have noted, the fate of Theron's lover was one of those things that was all too predictable.)

I know that perhaps I should not be so quick to pass judgment on this movie -- after all, Ms. Theron did appear to be trying her best to be a convincing female James Bond -- but darn it! Salt faced many of the same problems and dealt with them in an interesting manner. Atomic Blonde did not. I could watch Salt over and over again. Atomic Blonde, by comparison, seemed hard enough to sit through once. It was not really a bad movie but in the end, it was a disappointing movie.