Why did Percival kill Delphine? Percival had to take out Delphine because she knew too much about his back-alley dealings with the Soviets. (One thing is for sure: The Brits are always the last to know in Atomic Blonde.) So how does this explain all of the other crazy shit that goes down before said reveals? Let’s put some of the characters’ previous actions into focus. As Percival tells the audience in his final monologue, he’s learned only one thing during his years in the divided city: “I fucking love Berlin!”īut, surprise! The second reveal: Broughton is the lyingest liar of them all, working not only as a fake double agent for the KGB, but as a CIA plant within MI6. The first: Percival is not in fact a protector of Western ideals and a sworn enemy of the communists, but has become a self-serving libertine who has no further intention of working for his native government and is, in fact, trying to get Broughton killed so she doesn’t harsh the vibe he’s got going in Germany. The twists: Since this is a movie about spies lying to each other, every character is meant to be seen as at least semi-suspicious - even Broughton, which tees up both of Atomic’s big reveals. It’s a Snatch-esque plot where everyone is gaming each other (and chasing down a list of names instead of a giant diamond) thus, we are treated to a steady stream of endurance-testing fight scenes, ironic music queues, racks of fabulous outfits, a few very sexy encounters between Theron and Sofia Boutella (playing Delphine Lasalle, the rookie French agent who’s not as smooth as she thinks she is), and a lot of dirty crazy from James McAvoy, who plays David Percival, Theron’s contact on the ground in Berlin. But as Broughton finds out as soon as she touches down, she’ll be wading through a sea of KGB, French intelligence, Stasi operatives, and even rogue members of her own organization in order to return the list to British custody. The Brits are extra-incentivized, because the list will tell them the identity of Satchel, an MI6 mole who has been working with the Russians. Gascoigne was chased down and killed by a Russian agent named Bakhtin (Jóhannes Jóhannesson), who took the list, and now MI6 wants it back. Another MI6 agent, James Gascoigne, had been in possession of a list containing the identities of every espionage officer in the city on both sides of the Cold War conflict. The basic story: Theron plays MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, who’s dispatched to Berlin in the late fall of 1989 to retrieve information vital to the safety of Western intelligence officers. So let’s break down that big finish, just to make sure we’re all on the same page about the end of the Cold War, as well as the end of Atomic Blonde. Understandably, this all makes the ending of the movie more than a little confusing. And where the Wick movies have a lot of characters that are introduced mostly to add flavor, everyone in Blonde seems to have a stake in the outcome, making for a complex web of motivations and personalities. That is the whole of John Wick.Ītomic Blonde could have kept things similarly streamlined and been better for it, but instead, it gives us John Wick plus vengeance plus espionage plus multiple plot strands and even the fall of the Berlin Wall to contend with. With nothing in his heart but vengeance and sadness, Wick embarks on a furious mission to kill the man who murdered his dog, and also dismantle an entire organized-crime operation in the process, because it’s getting in the way of his killing spree. The elevator pitch for Atomic Blonde, the second violent ballet from John Wick director David Leitch, was clearly, “ John Wick, but starring a gorgeous actress, and no dead dogs.” It’s a good idea, as the Keanu Reeves vehicle was almost perfect in its simplicity: A retired assassin mourning his recently deceased wife is attacked by thugs who take the only thing he has left to remind him of her - an adorable little puppy.
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