Only a day after terrorizing downtown Manhattan with a rain of remote-controlled cars, Charlize Theron is back at it again, this time as an intelligence agent kicking serious amounts of ass in the trailer for Atomic Blonde. The movie, which will premiere at the SXSW Film Festival this weekend, is the solo directing debut of John Wick’s David Leitch, and if that lineage didn’t already give you an idea of what to expect, the trailer opens with an apparently unbroken 30-second shot in which Theron takes on two assailants with both a pistol and her fists—not to mention a fairly lethal-looking pair of black boots—in a stairwell. (We could do without the slowed-down version of “Blue Monday,” which is already pretty morose on its own, thanks, but “Killer Queen” is always welcome.) The red-band trailer features a few choice bits of blood spatter and a couple of F-bombs, and while we’re on the subject of the F-word, quite a bit of her character in various stages of undress, which is a bit of a departure from the fairly sexless John Wick movies. It opens with the camera sliding up her fishnet-clad thighs—perhaps an inadvertent callback to her first screen credit for 2 Days in the Valley—and later shows her slipping naked into an ice-filled bathtub and then grabbing a few stray cubes to drop into a glass of vodka. And then there’s the sequence where she slams Sofia Boutella’s Russian operative up against a wall but not in a manner that suggests she wants to beat the crap out of her. So Atomic Blonde: Yea or nay? Let’s go with, “Hell, yea.”
Atomic Blonde will be released on July 28.
