You know you’ve got a problem when someone in your movie calls the protagonist “a cliché” and there’s no counterargument, ever, at any point in the film. Reed Morano’s “The Rhythm Section” takes well-worn genre material and removes all the substance and ingenuity, leaving behind only an undeveloped plot, a blank main character, and a sense of gravitas that is entirely unearned.
It hardly feels like a story. It’s as though a vague structure somehow got a mind of its own and wandered into cinemas without supervision.
Blake Lively plays Stephanie Patrick, a young woman who used to be one of the top two students at Oxford, but now she’s a drug-addicted sex worker, which is all the work that “The Rhythm Section” thinks is necessary to show she’s sad.