Violet and Daisy comes off like teenagers playing Quentin Tarantino.

Credit director Joe Wright with trying to avoid pigeonholing himself. His first two films, the period dramas Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, garnered much critical love and comparisons to a previous British master of sumptuous, graceful period pieces, David Lean. Not content to play just to the Masterpiece Theatre set, he set his sights on more modern material — with mixed results — in The Soloist. And now, radically shifting genres yet again, Wright delivers a thoroughly breathtaking, heart-racing international espionage thriller with fairy-tale overtones and a thumping electronic soundtrack from The Chemical Brothers — a band he used to work with in his pre-cinema days directing and crewing rave-inspired music videos that probably inform this work a great deal more than anything he’s done in feature films.