Atomic Blonde Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

2. The Excessive Use Of Pop Music

Make no mistake, there is a lot of excellent music in this movie, but it's so aggressively employed as a stylistic device that it's hard to not feel like director David Leitch is desperately pandering to the audience.

Remember when everyone piled on Suicide Squad for vomiting forced, on-the-nose pop songs all over the viewer to make it 100% clear what the tone and intent of each scene was?

Well, Atomic Blonde doesn't go quite that far, but the musical choices are still rather heavy-handed, and the speed with which Leitch switches from one song to the next just makes it seem that much more excessive.

There are far worse crimes for a movie to commit, but ultimately after a point, all these slick fight scenes set to classic pop songs just reek of directorial masturbation.