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 Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

The most unfortunate thing about The Amazing Spider-Man, Marc Webb’s reboot starring Andrew Garfield as the titular web-slinger, is that it wasn’t released in a different year.  In any other year, you might have been reading a very different review of this film, but as a superhero film released in 2012, The Amazing Spider-Man stands between The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises – easily two of the best superhero movies of all time – and the comparison makes The Amazing Spider-Man’s faults all the more apparent.

Not that it’s a bad film, by any stretch of the imagination.  We’re not looking at another Batman & Robin or even Superman III; in fact, it’s even better than the last two-thirds of Spider-Man 3.  There is much that The Amazing Spider-Man does right, but it’s bogged down by pulled punches and an overreliance on attempting to distance itself from the Raimi trilogy.

From frame one, the focus is on Peter Parker (Garfield) and not Spider-Man; we learn more about his parents, who died under mysterious circumstances, and he doesn’t don the costume for what feels like a very long time (more on that later).  He romances classmate and science intern Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in what must be the most awkward courtship ever while Oscorp’s desperate herpetologist Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) seeks to stabilize his reptilian vaccination against human weakness.

In a post-Dark Knight Rises world, remembering the value of hope, I’m going to close this review with a consideration of what succeeds in The Amazing Spider-Man, but first, the bad news.

First and foremost, the film feels overly long; at two hours and sixteen minutes, it’s the shortest of the Big Three this summer (The Avengers 2:23 and The Dark Knight Rises 2:47), but it doesn’t feel like it, mostly because the film takes a very long time to get started.  While there is much about the film that is original, a lot of it feels very familiar; it’s only been ten years since the first Spider-Man film, and though there are minor changes to the origin story it’s mostly intact from before.  You can even see the filmmakers trying to swim around the original when Uncle Ben (played with quiet graceful authority, as always, by Martin Sheen) talks in circuitous language in an attempt not to say the exact words “With great power comes great responsibility.”  While the film, as a remake, can’t rely on what went before, the attempts to distance itself focus too much on cosmetic details and not on retelling the story in a significant way.

As a consequence of this over-familiarity, the film feels as though nothing’s happening.  The interesting plotline of Richard and May Parker is abandoned early on, apparently on reserve for a sequel; while I understand the desire to build a franchise, this thread might have sufficiently distanced Webb’s interpretation from Raimi’s, as the Parkers were entirely absent from the earlier trilogy.  Instead we get an Uncle Ben who’s only in the film to die; Sheen, though as good a choice as Cliff Roberston, is an actor whose skill is squandered.  (As Aunt May, Sally Field is an expected disappointment; her teary performance feels stilted and a poor substitute for the moving Rosemary Harris.)  Similarly, the Curt Connors plotline is only interesting insofar as the audience knows he’s going to become The Lizard; audiences who aren’t aware of this plotbeat don’t have any foreshadowing to lean on and may wonder why we’re spending so much time with a one-armed scientist who knows less about the Parkers than Peter thinks he does.

It’s a quest narrative that is abandoned not only by its storytellers but by its protagonist.  The film is set up as the story of Peter’s attempts to understand his parents, but when the film stops looking for answers so does Peter.  In this respect it’s an even bigger cop-out than the ending of Prometheus – at least in that film someone was still interested in the questions that incited the plot in the first place.

In many ways, the comparison to Prometheus is apt because The Amazing Spider-Man, too, is a weak story told extremely well.  Aside from the disorienting POV shots that seem designed to sell videogames rather than put us in Spidey’s shoes, Andrew Garfield is pitch-perfect as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man, capturing the teenager’s innate awkwardness but eminent likeability while also mastering the graceful body language of the hero, in flight and fight; he puts the friendly back in "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man."  You won’t be surprised to hear that my opinion of Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy is similarly high; it’s no wonder she’s Peter’s first great love, a connection fostered not by the script they’re given but by the chemistry they develop.  It’s perhaps too convenient that she’s an intern at the one place where a friend of Spider-Man is needed, but she ably executes her main function in the script – the love interest, the damsel sans distress (she saves Spidey’s keister at least twice in moments that mercifully don’t feel shoehorned in by the PC Police).

As for Ifans, he’s an oddball choice by virtue of being a master oddball.  His descent into schizophrenia – in which Webb finally masters a comic book’s use of internal dialogue by employing voiceover smartly – recalls his expertly creepy turn in Enduring Love, and his scenes as The Lizard (assisted, of course, by CGI) create a foe that is successfully unlike anything from the Raimi trilogy.  While The Lizard was teased by the appearance of Dylan Baker as Dr. Connors in the Raimi films, this Lizard is a foe worth fighting, with a bizarre plan that never feels out-of-place thanks to the film’s clear translation that the once-good doctor is losing his mind.

And Marc Webb, known for his directorial debut on (500) Days of Summer, demonstrates that he’s aptly named, since he gets inside of Spider-Man’s head and directs the action in an efficient manner.  He handles the romantic plot better in some ways, since the chemistry between Garfield and Stone is so tangible that it salvages a somewhat clumsy and unenthusiastic screenplay in that regard.  While it’s hard not to get a good movie out of one as well-performed as this one, it’s significant that Webb’s only apparent misstep is the odd and uneven use of POV shots when Spidey swings into action; perhaps these looked better in 3D, but that’s a remark a film reviewer should never have to make.

Ultimately, The Amazing Spider-Man is too many films for its own good; the Parkers’ past and the origin story are neglected and uninspiring, respectfully, while The Lizard’s arc is the best of the three but is introduced as a distraction before becoming the main plot.  But none of these films are told poorly; the actors are gifted, the effects dazzling.  What redeems this film is that it’s just good enough to suggest that a sequel might be truly great; now that the obligatory ground has been walked, the franchise can move in a new direction with a cast that embodies Stan Lee’s original stories perhaps better than Raimi’s crew ever did.

Who knows?  When all’s said and done, the sequel could even rival Spider-Man 2.

The Amazing Spider-Man is rated PG-13 “for sequences of action and violence.”  The action sequences are more personal here than before, with large slashes and cuts rendered in each combatant’s body in bloody but not graphic detail.  Some of The Lizard’s transformations might be frightening to younger folk, but overall the film is bloodier than Raimi’s work.