The Rhythm Section seems like it might be an attempt to create an action franchise around Blake Lively. And that’s something I could support. Unfortunately, it appears that Ms Lively is going to have to find some other way to make ends meet, as this boring barely-an-action film isn’t going to be launching anything. (Spoiler: Ms Lively is going to be fine.)

The movie introduces Lively as our heroine in a flash-forward scene that shows her putting a gun to someone’s head in Tangiers. This is because action films are supposed to start in media res, and there’s no real middle of the story here to begin with, so it quickly flashes back some amount of time. (There was text on the screen that said how much time, but that was the first of a great many things I truly didn’t care about in this movie.)

Now, we find Lively’s character Stephanie as a drug-addicted prostitute in London. By some means that the movie never makes clear, a reporter played by Raza Jaffray has found her and pays her just to talk (of course) because he has learned that she’s the sole survivor of a family who had been on a plane that blew up over the Atlantic years earlier, when (we learn through oh-so-many flashbacks) Stephanie had been happy and healthy as a member of the World’s Best Family. But of course, for reasons the movie never makes clear, she hadn’t joined her family on that ill-fated flight, and her survivor’s guilt led her to drugs and prostitution.

For… reasons, she decides soon after (while in a drugged-out haze) that maybe that reporter dude might be able to… well, we aren’t sure what she hopes to gain, exactly, but she calls him and goes to his apartment where we learn that he’s one of those crazy people who has his walls covered with newspaper clippings about the crash, which it turns out wasn’t the accident the government and the press and the rest of the Deep State wanted everyone to think it was. Instead, it was a terrorist attack (by, of course, Muslim extremists).

A whole bunch of boring stuff follows, but before too long (and after way, way too long), she ends up in Scotland in the home of Jude Law (as one does), an ex-MI-6 operative who is also somehow connected to the conspiracy and, for reasons the movie never makes clear, decides that the best person to train to take on the Deep State and the extremists and probably James Bond himself is this woman who literally a few days before had been a prostitute addicted to heroin.

Nevertheless, he cleans her up (because, remember folks, a heroin addiction can be made to go away magically with a couple days’ rest and some good old-fashioned exercise), trains her (it turns out anyone can become a super spy in a few weeks if you just work at it hard enough), and then sends her off around the world to hunt down and kill everyone responsible for the plane crash.

Yeah, it’s that kind of movie. And look, I can suspend my disbelief like no one’s business, but there is a point where your movie still has to make sense. And when you’ve edited out every bit of explanation about why your characters are behaving the way they are, and when you make it so your hero just magically shows up everywhere she needs to be and runs into all the right people at exactly the right moment, well… the fact that she went from heroin addict to action heroine in just a few weeks becomes the most believable part of your story.

At a certain point, you start to suspect that she’s probably being double or maybe triple crossed, but by that point, you’ve long since given up caring about anything that is going to happen and you just focus on the movie’s one saving grace: it’s only an hour and 49 minutes long.

If you want to see Blake Lively seriously kicking some ass, check out The Shallows from a few years ago. You can of course see Jude Law in any number of good movies. Raza Jaffrey is in Lost in Space on Netflix, which you definitely need to see. But The Rhythm Section is one to leave alone and forget.