Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

Though my original review was perhaps a little more even-tempered than I initially recalled, I look back on Kingsman: The Secret Service with great fondness, cringing at some of the bawdier moments but overall greatly sympathizing with director Matthew Vaughn’s appreciation for the 1960s era of spy films (particularly James Bond, though – as the characters are fond of reminding you – “dis ain’t dat kinda film, bruv”). While its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, is an enthusiastic action film with more than a few decent thrills, I was not transported in the way I was with the first film; that is, if the original were Skyfall, The Golden Circle is more Spectre, a sequel that doesn’t misstep but doesn’t transcend like its predecessor did.

After a coordinated attack on Kingsman, secret agent Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and gadget guy Merlin (Mark Strong) link up with their “American cousins” (Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, and Pedro Pascal) at Statesman to avenge their fallen comrades. As the trailers have revealed, however, a comrade also rises – Harry Hart (Colin Firth) returns to the service for the fight against the cartel leader Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), who controls the worldwide drug trade from her 1950s-infused lair.

As I was watching The Golden Circle, I couldn’t help but think of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a sequel to a similarly inventive and strong first outing. Though the two sequels do have a similar “more of the same” quality to them, never triumphing as their predecessors might have led one to expect, I can safely say that Golden Circle is unlike A Dame in that it’s not boring. Where A Dame felt almost sleepily safe and content merely to reproduce what had gone before, Golden Circle shakes up the script and goes to places one wouldn’t expect. Though slickly devised, Harry’s return is anything but smooth, and it leads to an interesting new dynamic with Eggsy. It’s a real treat also to see a British stereotype of Americans; if The Secret Service satirized Britain’s vision of itself, Golden Circle is a dashing wink of a cliché of the United States, with its cowboy whiskey peddlers and honky-tonk bars.

The Golden Circle is not, as the trailers might have led you to believe, a film about the Statesman agents (though apparently Vaughn wants to make that spinoff). Aside from Pascal, who participates in the film’s rousingly thrilling Spy Who Loved Me by way of OHMSS action setpiece, the Statesman cast amounts to an extended cameo. The focus is squarely – rightly, as fun watching Statesman can be – on the Kingsman agents and the high-octane action that follows them. The film opens with an extensive (and, in IMAX, quite loud) taxi chase through London; you’ve also got the ski chase sequence, a snowy shootout, and the raid on Poppy’s HQ, all of which feel substantively different than what we saw in the first Kingsman film.

This Kingsman is about twenty minutes longer than the first one, and I have to say it does feel it. There’s a recurring gag about Elton John that overstays its welcome, and this film does feel a bit bogged down by laddish humor, perhaps more so than before (but mercifully not as bad as in Kick-Ass 2, which actively suffered from this). The first Kingsman famously ends (no spoilers) with an unconventional send-up of Bond’s get-the-girl closer, and while it’s tonally off-putting it wasn’t as cringingly gross as Eggsy’s encounter at the Glastonbury Music Festival, which does leave a bad taste on the film for a while. Perhaps overall the film needs more of what Colin Firth brought to the first film and to Eggsy’s training – a Pygmalion for the surveillance crowd, polishing up the rough bits and reminding us to stand a little straighter. (Put another way, “Manners maketh man.”)

Back in 2015, Kingsman: The Secret Service was better than most of us were expecting it to be, especially since it was pitted (you’ll recall) against the guaranteed box-office winner 50 Shades of Gray. The Golden Circle, however, is not as good as it should have been, though neither is it as bad as it could have been. It’s not as impressive as the first, which is a tragedy, but it’s a fine second entry and a cheering diversion at its best.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, drug content, language throughout, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. Based on the comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, and Julianne Moore.

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Hail, Caesar! tickles a lot of my moviegoing fancies: it’s a dark comedy farce courtesy of the Coen Brothers, in which an all-star cast of buffoons blunders their way through old Hollywood while the plot twists and turns like a postmodern poodle chasing its own tail. That may not be everyone’s cup of tea, recalling the plotless meandering of The Big Sleep and its successors, but for me it’s the most fun I’ve had at a movie in a long while (yes, maybe even more fun than Deadpool).

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has the unenviable job of being the chief “fixer” for Capitol Pictures; when something goes amuck, it’s Eddie’s task to make sure the motion picture shows go on. The latest catastrophe he’s tasked with suppressing is the abduction of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), Capitol’s number-one star, though somewhat of a lush and a dim bulb. Of course, the Capitol lot is busy with numerous other crises, including a disgruntled mermaid (Scarlett Johansson), a highstrung director (Ralph Fiennes) and his twanging lead actor (Alden Ehrenreich), twin newspaper columnists (Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton), and a chipper musical star (Channing Tatum).

I’m reviewing Hail, Caesar! as someone who has very much partaken of the Coen kool-aid, so if The Big Lebowski was never your cup of tea or if Burn After Reading left you feeling parched, this is really more of the same, and you’d be better off watching something else. I say “more of the same” not as a negative, because I’m personally delighted to see more of the madcap mania the Coens have turned into a personal brand because it’s not something I get anywhere else at the cinema. No one does horseplay like Joel and Ethan Coen.

As for the plotlessness of Hail, Caesar!, the film is akin to an indoor amusement ride in which the audience shuffles from film set to film set to peek in on a day (27 hours, to be precise) in the life of 1950s Hollywood, and each of these individual setpieces is an exercise in the line between straight-face and satire. The Coens are masters at straddling this line, allowing the characters’ idiocy to penetrate to the foreground without the need to resort to caricature or signposting. On the surface, there’s nothing intrinsically funny about Tatum’s song-and-dance routine, but there’s something about the deadset sincerity, coupled with the amazingly insightful small nods to clichés of the era (such as taking the bartender’s dish rag and polishing his bald dome with it), leave the audience rolling with laughter – a continuous giggle punctuated by bursts of glee. Which is not to say there aren’t jokes; the moment when an Eastern Orthodox priest dismisses a chariot stunt as “fakey” is as funny as anything in a comedy special, and the moment when Hobie finds it difficult to drop his accent when saying “Would that it twere so simple” gets funnier the longer the gag goes on.

Then there’s the ever-present Coen delight of seeing a team of A-listers perambulating through the spectacle. Brolin is engaging as the over-hardboiled fixer, gritting his way through exaggerated Catholic guilt, and his interactions with the other cast members carry the film on his tensed shoulders. As ever, it’s a delight to see George Clooney playing the quintessential Coen idiot, who here scratches his head at his own kidnapping while being naively dazzled when his captors introduce him to the writings of Karl Marx. Even Coen mainstay (and spouse) Frances McDormand pops in for a vignette as a film editor whose scarves get caught in the projection reels. Delightfully madcap cameos like this one make Hail, Caesar! a standout.

At the conclusion of Hail, Caesar! everything wraps up fairly quickly and tidily. Whether this is a ending far too pat for the demands of realism, or whether I simply didn’t want the film to end, is up for debate; or is it, as the film suggests, a commentary on the function of films in society, as illusory dreams constrained by their own rules, entirely divorced from reality? It’s the final indication that Hail, Caesar! is something much smarter than it might initially present. The joke is on the characters, not on the audience, and the steadfast refusal of the Coens to pander is a tremendous credit to us and to them. Hail, Caesar! indeed!

Hail, Caesar! is rated PG-13 for “some suggestive content and smoking.” There’s a quick mention of an unwed pregnancy and one unelaborated mention of sodomy.

Heads up, True Believers – we’ll continue to Make Yours Marvel this Wednesday with another installment in “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” so check back then for 2010’s Iron Man 2. Or subscribe above, and receive those missives right in your inbox. Nuff said!

22 Jump Street (2014)

We were all caught off guard by 21 Jump Street, which led every cynical filmgoer to scoff at the idea of rebooting the silly premise of a late-80s TV show best known for giving us Johnny Depp.  But retrospectively, these being the same directors behind The Lego Movie, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised.  I don’t think 22 Jump Street is as good as its predecessor, in part because Phil Lord and Christopher Miller don’t quite – and can’t, in fact – surprise us the way they did last time, though it is enough fun and better than your average sequel.

In a bit of meta-commentary, Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are reassigned across the street to 22 Jump to “do the same exact thing” – track down a new designer drug – albeit in a college setting this time.  That is essentially the whole plot; Ice Cube returns with a slightly larger role as Captain Dickson, and Peter Stormare plays drug supplier Ghost with his reliable brand of comic menace.

First of all, I will say that 22 Jump Street is very funny.  It’s not as funny as the first one, but it is funny enough.  In fact, interestingly enough, had the first film not been so good, I think 22 Jump Street might have come off better; that is, it suffers only by comparison, which is paradoxically both unfair and (in this case) inevitable.

It’s a comparison that’s made all the more apparent by the film’s central conceit of “do the exact same thing” – and indeed, it is very similar to the first film despite the apparent self-consciousness at play.  This is a very funny gag at first, particularly in a scene in which Nick Offerman’s police chief stands in for studio executives, expressing puzzlement that the first film/case worked as well as it did before sending Hill & Tatum back to the grind.  I say “at first,” however, because this is a clever gimmick that runs out of steam about halfway through the film, after which the writers continue to introduce it with diminishing wit.  I see a lot of film critics falling over themselves to praise this move, but it certainly grows tiresome by the one-hour mark.

Fortunately, 22 Jump Street isn’t predicated solely on satirizing the sequel.  Instead, it wisely remembers that the big success coming out of 21 Jump was the surprise chemistry between Hill and Tatum, and the two continue to play off each other well.  Tatum in particular gives the break-out performance of the film, continuing the simpleton (self-)caricature from the first film but giving Jenko moments of clarity and self-awareness.  His are some of the funniest scenes in the film, particularly his well-timed delayed reaction to a key revelation, though Ice Cube is still the key scene stealer with his boisterous delivery and clear disdain for the protagonists.

There is, ultimately, not much else to say about 22 Jump Street.  It’s not better than the first one, which is, to be fair, a rather tough act to follow.  It is, however, better than most comedy sequels, which often merely replicate the success of the original.  But I don’t think the difference between 22 Jump and sequels like The Hangover: Part II is simply down to self-awareness.  22 Jump Street is actually quite funny in its own right, even divorced from its predecessor.  It only becomes something less by comparison, and while I’m still not sure if it’s fair to judge a movie “by comparison” I do know for a fact that I had enough fun with 22 Jump that I can recommend it, especially for fans of the original.

22 Jump Street is rated R for “language throughout, sexual content, drug material, brief nudity and some violence.”  F-bombs abound, as does talk about “hooking up” and the like.  The premise of the film revolves around a new mystery drug, which causes characters to “trip” in a very cartoony sequence.  There is gunplay, explosions, and some blood, but I don’t recall any nudity (nor does IMDb’s Parents Guide).

Come back on Thursday for a look at Disney’s latest, Maleficent!

Monday at the Movies - February 18, 2013

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  On the dock for today, two films marketed as comedies – but which one is actually funny?

The Dictator (2012) – Look, I’m a big fan of Sacha Baron Cohen, both his prankumentary style (which he perfected in 2006’s Borat) and his more traditional character work (with which he stole Les Misérables).  On the surface, The Dictator ought to be a delightful blend of those two – a scripted comedy about a hapless Middle Easterner with a ludicrous accent.  Instead, what you get is a confused and barely-funny satire of... well, the film never quite focuses on one target long enough for a sustained take on Arab dictatorship, college yuppie liberalism, or American democracy.  Any one of these could be the subject for a clever comedy, but the odd melding of the three leaves us uncertain who we’re supposed to root for.  Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen with his usual enthusiasm, but he’s pumping air into a disappointingly lifeless script which is, for vast stretches, entirely without laughs.  Many of the gaffes are predictable, elongated beyond their worth, or just plain unfunny, and even Cohen’s trademark disappearance behind the character isn’t enough to engage the audience.  There are a few chuckles to be had – cameos by John C. Reilly and a self-deprecating Megan Fox gesture toward a palpable and intriguing direction for the film – but mostly the film seems unsure what it wants to be and tries to be all those things at once, making for a very disunified whole.  The film is a lot like Ben Kingsley’s role therein (yes, Sir Ben costars):  you don’t quite know how so many talented people got into such a mess, but you’re disappointed that they’re not doing better work.

21 Jump Street (2012) – Nothing about this movie screams success; in fact, nothing about the film should work.  A remake of an ’80s TV show, 21 Jump Street stars Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill as undercover cops in a high school where new illegal drugs are being distributed.  I repeat:  no part of that sentence has really ever worked in a movie before.  Yet there’s something about 21 Jump Street that is surprising in a very good way:  the movie is very funny, rather clever, and just downright better than it ought to be.  Hill and Tatum have tangible chemistry as partners, best friends, and pseudo-brothers; they play off each other like Simon Pegg and Nick Frost do in Shaun of the Dead (among others), exploiting each other’s foibles while working together to accomplish their goals.  The film is incredibly self-aware, with many characters acknowledging and poking fun at the fact that Hill and Tatum look far too old to be high schoolers, but the film’s greater strength is its funny script given life by a bevy of talented supporting cast members.  It’s almost enough just to mention their names – Nick Offerman, Ellie Kemper, Rob Riggle – because their work is reliable and solid.  (Kudos also to Ice Cube, who practically steals the show as a self-conscious walking stereotype who shouts about Miranda rights and “Korean Jesus.”)  And yes, that original 21 Jump cast member makes a fun appearance, too.  A surprisingly entertaining entry from a team that’s never really delighted me before, 21 Jump Street deserves more than the casual brush-off its premise usually elicits.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!