I can’t think of any actor more deserving of their own pulpy action franchise than Charlize Theron. Having stolen Mad Max: Fury Road from Tom Hardy one-handed (literally), she is relentlessly, murderously brilliant in this adaptation of Antony Johnston’s graphic novel The Coldest City. The setting is Berlin just before the fall of the Wall; the paranoid hangover of the cold war is giving way to a new era of hungry opportunism. A British agent has been murdered; a valuable list is missing. And MI5 asset Lorraine Broughton (Theron, looking like Debbie Harry dipped in venom) is flown in to clear up the mess. There she butts heads with fellow agent David Percival (James McAvoy, skeevy-sexy, accessorised with beer sweats and casual treachery) and has a fling with rookie French spy Delphine (Sofia Boutella, lots of smouldering in fishnet body stockings).
First time director David Leitch favours a sleazy, neon aesthetic that looks like an X-rated, ultraviolent knock-off of a Duran Duran video. The soundtrack is a largely credible mix tape of 80s pop-rock featuring New Order, Depeche Mode, Siouxsie and the Banshees and, perhaps inevitably, Nena’s 99 Luftballons. But it’s in the action that Leitch, formerly a stunt co-ordinator and second unit director, shines. Most notable is the blitzkrieg of an action climax, a 10-minute “single shot” as ambitious as anything in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, which sees Lorraine crunch and batter her way in and back out of a dank East Berlin tenement, using guns, feet, fists, a two-ring hotplate, a corkscrew and a car to dispatch the Soviet agents on her tail.
In fact, the appearance of a one-take sequence is created by seamlessly stitching together nearly 40 separate shots. But even knowing this doesn’t lessen the pulse-pounding, propulsive thrust. You forget to breathe. More importantly, you forget to question the needlessly complicated layers of double-crossing that clog up the third act of an otherwise impressively lean piece of storytelling.
