Charlize Theron and friends (Jonathan Prime/Focus Features)

With Atomic Blonde, the makers of John Wick have swapped out brooding franchise star Keanu Reeves, with his tendency to monotonally grunt out, “I’ll kill them all,” for the deadly, gazelle-like Charlize Theron—and have come up with something that might be even better.

Welcome to your new favorite action franchise.

Theron stars as MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, who as the film opens is tending to her bruised and beaten body and watching footage of the celebration in the wake of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

The movie is set in 1989, days before the wall is to come down. David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” starts the movie’s spot-on ’80s soundtrack, and sure, Quentin Tarantino may have used it not long ago for Inglorious Basterds, but it suits the smoldering, neon-drenched scene. It’s a nice example of soundtrack choices doing the work of the screenwriter; the theme introduces Broughton as someone, like the protagonist of the Cat People movies, who has a primal urge for violence that she is conflicted about but is nevertheless powerless to stop.

Broughton is a spy caught in a complicated multi-agency intrigue that involves a designer wristwatch whose gears hide a valuable list of the world’s secret agents, including the mysterious double-agent Satchel. Could this Satchel be agent David Perceval (James McAvoy), whose allegiances seem to go as far as who’s paying him?

McAvoy doesn’t generate much tension in the uncertain relationship with his MI6 foil (which may be part of the reason the movie’s trailer plays up the minor dalliance with French agent Sofia Boutella), but the movie has a couple of deep character actor cuts: Toby Jones plays one of Broughton’s agency interrogators, and Eddie Marsan is a Soviet defector codenamed Spyglass whose downtrodden passport photos alone should earn him a Best Supporting Actor nom.

But the star is Theron, who proved her action hero chops in Mad Max: Fury Road and does even better here. She has a commanding presence and long weaponized limbs that the action choreographers put to maximum use, especially in an extended fight scene that turns a stairwell into a brutal battlefield recalling the meticulously ultraviolent set pieces of The Raid: Redemption—it’s that good.

From crime dramas to superhero blockbusters, most contemporary action movies are shot with violently shaking camerawork and edited so it’s all but impossible to see exactly where the fists and bullets and coming from or where they land. Twenty years ago, stuntmen Chad Stahelski and David Leitsch formed the production company 87eleven, and in the past few years their experiment has borne a bloody and beautifully choreographed fruit: two John Wick movies full of operatic scenery, brutal gunplay, and beatings that are filmed like a good dance number.

Directed by David Leitch, Atomic Blonde ups their game with better pacing and a slow burn that, once it explodes, doesn’t look back.

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Atomic Blonde
Directed by David Lietch
Written by Kurt Johnstad, based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart.
With Charlize Theron, JamesMcAvoy, John Goodman
Rated R for sequences of strong violence, language throughout, and some sexuality/nudity
115 minutes
Opens today at area theaters.