Pun Salad

A DVD that Netflix sent me, skipping over a number of items higher in my queue (e.g., Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Joker, The Farewell, Judy,…). Well, OK.

Noomi Rapace plays Alice, a CIA agent relegated to a trivial desk job due to (allegedly) failing to prevent a terrorist incident in Paris that killed a lot of innocents. She retains her interrogation skills, though, and the intelligence agency finds that she's needed to discover the communication channels used to set up a possible imminent bioterror attack somewhere in London.

Needless to say, things go wrong, with a considerable amount of gunplay. In addition to Noomi, there's John Malkovich as the (somewhat goofy) head of the CIA, Michael Douglas as Alice's one-time superior, Orlando Bloom as (perhaps) a British ex-Marine now burglarizing apartments, and Toni Colette as an MI-5 higher up.

I liked it a lot better than Atomic Blonde, probably because its provenance does not include comic books. And everything about Noomi Rapace screams "intelligence" while Charlize Theron screams "bimbo".

A lot of action and betrayal. One flaw: you know one of these stars is going to be Revealed as the prime Bad Guy, and it gets pretty obvious who it is. ("I don't think they'd hire that person to play this role, unless…")

And of course, a bunch of shady Arabs that could be terrorists. Not in modern-day cinema, friend.