The King's Man (2021)

Matthew Vaughn knows he doesn’t need to keep making Kingsman movies, right? The original Kingsman film, The Secret Service, was a breath of fresh air (and a welcome bit of counterprogramming for those of us who didn’t want to see 50 Shades of Gray for Valentine’s Day 2015). The Golden Circle, however, was somewhat inert as a sequel, cringingly gross and overly enamored of itself. Fortunately, The King’s Man is a sight better than The Golden Circle, but it is dizzy and daft in a way that does it no favors.

The pacifist Orlando, Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), wants nothing more than to keep his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) out of the military, but the rising tides of the First World War conspire against them. Orlando and his servants (Gemma Arterton, Djimon Hounsou) form an ad hoc intelligence agency with Conrad to root out a conspiracy that includes the likes of Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), and Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl).

 

It’s worth remembering, after seven years and three films, that this all began as an adaptation of a 2012 comic book by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). I haven’t read the original comic in some years now, but my recollection was that it’s a fine soft send-up of the James Bond formula. However, as I was watching The King’s Man, I was thinking of another comic book I’d been reading earlier that day – Bill Willingham’s Fables, which imagines (in the tradition of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) what would happen if all the fairy tales were true, their characters all inhabiting the same universe. And this is exactly the conceit of The King’s Man; with so many larger-than-life historical figures running around between 1914 and 1918, what if they all knew each other? What if most of them were in an international ring of espionage together?

 

When it’s done with fictional characters, it opens up a new world of possibilities, but there’s something discomfiting when it’s a constellation of real historical figures. Perhaps it’s a failing of my own imagination, but I think it’s also true that The King’s Man mucks about with very recent history in transparent and unfulfilling ways. Ultimately, it’s a failing of the film not to do something interesting with this reckless historiography. (See instead, for example, Inglourious Basterds.) If I’m spending time trying to remember my college survey courses in history, the film isn’t working.

 

Apologies to Ralph Fiennes, who is plainly better than anything the screenplay gives him to do. He works the dialogue like a prestige World War I film, and he navigates the action sequences like something out of a Daniel Craig 007 flick. It’s when the film channels its Bond DNA that The King’s Man really sings, as in a third-act confrontation atop a mountainous plateau. The franchise seems to have jettisoned the gross-out laddish humor of The Golden Circle, and it’s for the best, yet the Bond-ier sequences remind the audience just how good The Secret Service was, and why. 

 

As the film wound down its James Bond denouement, I found myself wishing more of the film had been like that, more Spy Who Loved Me and not alternate history. As it stands, The King’s Man is very episodic, which works somewhat in its favor; if you’re not enjoying the plot, so the old saying might go, stick around for twenty minutes until it changes. But consequently the film’s big claim that it all matters because it’s all interconnected – right up to a big bad reveal that’s a bit obvious even if you don’t recognize a certain actor’s voice – falls flat when it doesn’t quite feel like a united whole. Instead, The King’s Man is a collection of bits, some better and some worse, that never exactly add up to something grander.

 

Then there’s the matter of the postcredits scene, which promises/threatens that the historical muckraking will continue, with a particular bygone villain who is so baldly obvious that it might better have been left to a satire of The King’s Man. Indeed, so outlandish is the moment when two prominent historical figures shake hands and conspire toward The King’s Man II that one can only assume from the deadly straight-faced presentation that the filmmakers know how patently silly it is. We can also hope that they know better. The King’s Man is fun but not fun enough, and I think it is high time that Matthew Vaughn move on to something else.

 

The King’s Man is rated R for “sequences of strong/bloody violence, language, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Matthew Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek. Based on the comics by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Harris Dickinson, and Djimon Hounsou.

The Imitation Game (2014)

Had this review come out before this year’s Oscar nominations were announced, I would have begun this review with all the intonations of a futurist predicting a nomination for Benedict Cumberbatch (one I don’t expect he’ll win, but it’s an honor to be nominated, right?).  Safely ensconced in 2015, however, the best I can do is say, “I would have told you so.”

Cumberbatch stars as Alan Turing, the father of modern computing and a genius codebreaker who developed a sophisticated piece of machinery to break the Nazi “Enigma” code during World War II.  With the help of fellow scientific wunderkinds (Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode among them), Turing develops his machine, amid flash-forwards that reveal just how rankly abused he was after the war.

When we look back on 2014 at the movies, we’re going to see a lot of things – the persistence of the superhero renaissance courtesy of Marvel’s best and a talking tree, the surprise revival of at least one career, glimmers of hope in the form of original, non-franchise films – but what stands out to me more than any of these is the abundance of science-oriented pictures.  Neil deGrasse Tyson ought to be proud; he’s on record lamenting the lack of scientific imagination in America these days, and I can’t help but feel 2014 has been an attempt to redress that wrong.  To recap:  Big Hero 6, Interstellar, The Theory of Everything, now The Imitation Game.  Heck, I’ll even count Mr. Peabody & Sherman.

As for the historical accuracy of the piece, I’ve read that a fair bit of it takes creative liberties, all of which I think is in service of the dramatization and not at the expense of the truth.  The film conveys its message quite clearly and effectively, declaring what difficult work the codebreaking was and how ultimately immaterial Turing’s sexuality was in his work.  What matters to the film – and what should have mattered to his persecutors – was his genius and his service to his country, and the film’s sequences which depict the ill effects of Turing’s chemical castration are truly heartbreaking.

The heartbreak is entirely the fault of Mr. Cumberbatch, who rebrands his socially awkward Sherlock shtick in service of something less quirky and more earnest, the kind of performance which has been known to scream for awards but which smacks of none of the desperation so often found in such roles.  Cumberbatch’s Turing is quite natural, eager to get on with the job with none of the distractions along the way.  Because his performance is so totalizing, he does eclipse, unfortunately, his ostensible co-star Keira Knightley.  As Joan Clarke, an invaluable figure in the actual business of codebreaking, Knightley isn’t given as much to do, making her more ancillary than I might have liked.  Seeing the film from Clarke’s perspective might have been intriguing, though I understand The Imitation Game’s project is elsewhere.

Surprisingly, I will say that the film is very nearly stolen by Charles Dance and Mark Strong, who play two of Turing’s superiors during the war.  Dance plays the more standoffish military man, where Strong’s real life analogue was apparently also the inspiration for M in the James Bond novels.  While they’re clearly first and foremost foils for Turing, showing who he is by what they are not, Dance and Strong are consummate performers in the sense that they nail characterization within seconds of debuting on screen and continue to captivate.

I had lamented that The Theory of Everything was somewhat formulaic as a biopic, and in a sense the same is true of The Imitation Game, but I think it isn’t to the film’s detriment because The Imitation Game is a story that hasn’t been told (whereas Theory didn’t innovate as far beyond the “handicapped doing the remarkable” archetype as I would have liked, relying more as it did on the strength of Eddie Redmayne’s transformation).  On top of all that, it’s captivating in a way that manages to subvert the fact that the audience already knows the broad strokes of how the story will end.  I liked it, and I liked Cumberbatch; I’m glad to see him nominated, and though I’m sure the Oscar will go to Redmayne or to Michael Keaton, I hope to see more top-caliber work from him in the future.

The Imitation Game is rated PG-13 for “some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking.”  There are oblique and passing allusions to Turing’s homosexuality, culminating in his prosecution for indecency.  The film addresses bullying and the cost of war, including one scene of bombing.