So, David Cronenberg's tale of the Russian Mafia in London (his second film so far in this ongoing season) turns out to be nowhere near as difficult to watch as I'd feared. Sadly, it turns out to be nowhere near as interesting as I'd hoped, either.
There's the feeling (particularly towards the end of the film) that an intricate story of corruption, vice, family loyalties and power would have worked better laid out as a four-part TV drama, and that the extra screen-time that format allowed would make for stronger character building as a result. The gangsters that make up the film's principal movers feel like crudely drawn stereotypes here (although I've seen many worse portrayals in more recent years). On one hand, Cronenberg would like the audience to marvel at how 'real' everything is, but the then undercuts this by having his Russian-speaking mobsters talking in English to each other most of the time. Actual Russian scripting would have helped greatly with the authenticity, especially since the mumbled dialogue itself necessitates having the subtitles on throughout the runtime, anyway. Additionally, having your three main Russian characters played by German, French and American/Danish actors doesn't really help matters, either. I get the impression that Cronenberg was basically fine with how everyone sounded as long as it was 'foreign'.
Conversely, succeeding on the accent-front is Naomi Watts (already given a head-start by being Australian) as a troubled midwife from London who gets mixed up in the Russian power struggle after delivering a baby whose mother, an illegally-immigrated, coerced sex worker, dies at the same time. This, sadly, the accent is the only area in which Naomi succeeds. I like Watts, but she's really not that good an actress, and her default 'glazed' expression is used to its full extent in Eastern Promises, exacerbated by the fact that her role in the screenplay as the bridge between regular 'civilian' life and the unseen, seedy underworld seems to be treated as an afterthought after the first ten minutes of the movie. The naivety that should endear her character to the audience only serves to make her more irritating.
The only time Cronenberg ever seems to come into his own as a director is the infamous brawl-scene in the sauna-baths, and the fighting is presented with a surgical precision that the characterisation sorely needs.
Eastern Promises is a frankly ordinary film, made by an extraordinary film-maker. In the hands of a more 'human' director, the film's inhuman characters could have flourished more...
(Oh, and that baby would clearly have been born with a heroin addiction, yet this isn't even mentioned in the script.)
It didn't play at my local cinema, and it's not really the sort of cheery Saturday-night-fare you choose at random, so no.
Yes, although I don't feel I've gained much from it.
Only as part of a season of similar films, I think.
There ain't.
Naomi Watts starred in 2013's The Impossible alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi himself, Ewan McGregor..
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Oh, come on, I'm a middle-aged man that used to have hair longer than Randy 'The Ram' Robinson's. How am I supposed to concentrate on Marisa Tomei lapdancing when they're playing Firehouse over the top of it? So much of the film's 1980s soundtrack is either from my youth or my recent years playing GTA, that a film about a confused man living in the past seems less like the character study of a nostalgic narcissist and more like a secretly-filmed documentary…
Joking aside, the use of handheld cameras throughout the film does lend The Wrestler the feel of a fly-on-the-wall diary, bringing a sense of intimacy to the point of claustrophobia, particularly in the quieter scenes. It's these moments where Mickey Rourke's performance is at its strongest. The portrait of a faded pro-wrestler working the amateur circuit, The Ram is a man who can't let go of his glory days, not because he believes it to be better as such, but because he pretty much has no present to return to. Outside the ring, his existence is punctuated with links to his former life; the action figure of himself he keeps in his van, his licensed Nintendo NES game he's always got on standby ready to play in his trailer, or the collection of TDK mixtape cassettes next to his bed.
But aside from the character-building, The Wrestler is of course a film about a wrestler, and that's where we parted ways. As someone who fails to grasp any sport at even the most fundamental level, I found it difficult to give a shit about something I have absolutely no frame of reference for. The fact that pro-wrestling*1 is essentially a performance art anyway, only made things worse, not better. The lines between good acting, good wrestling and bad bit-part acting all blurred together a little too easily for me, and rapidly turned into something I just couldn't get involved with. The film is certainly well made, but I'd have been more interested if it had been an actual documentary (although again, with the notorious levels of showmanship involved in the sport, it may as well be).
Even with the scattershot subplots running into Randy's personal life, the pacing is a little too slow and disjointed for my tastes, and feels like a 70 minute film padded out for too long with b-roll footage.
Despite everything that Aronofsky skillfully throws at the viewer, I just couldn't connect with The Wrestler. Maybe I just prefer my fakery to be a little less real?
Nope. I was all poised to see it at my local cinema (it actually played there), then didn't quite get round to it for whatever reason.
Well, I'd be hard pushed to say I really 'enjoyed' The Wrestler, but it interested the fuck out of me, on film-making level.
Only if you're looking for something a little challenging that's not exactly deep, but definitely has more going on under the surface.
Didn't hear one. Although it's not that kind of movie, I suppose.
Mickey Rourke starred in 2006's Stormbreaker, as did Ewan McGregor from the Star Wars prequel trilogy and Andy Serkis from the Star Wars sequel trilogy (well, The Force Awakens at least).
*1 ie the spandex/arena type wrestling as opposed to the olympic type wrestling shown in Foxcatcher. Although to be fair I struggled to give a shit about that as well.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
This review contains spoilers. Big, massive, reality-rending spoilers which defy all logic and causality. Just like Project Almanac itself, in fact. For words about the film without giving everything away, you should read this review, instead. Thanks.
Now, I know I shouldn't hold up Project Almanac to the standard set by Looper, as that's a bit like comparing The Expendables to Apocalypse Now, but I'm pretty much going to. A good time-travel movie doesn't have to convince the audience exactly how the machine/device/portal operates, only that it does. And rest assured, Project Almanac makes little-to-no attempt to unravel the operational parameters of a backpack-sized device which incorporates sixteen car batteries and a cannibalised Xbox. The characters say it works, the films shows that it works, that's good enough for me.
However, when a time-travel movie is going to centre itself around causality-loops (and that is largely the point of them, to be fair), then the screenplay does have to set out and abide by The Rules™. These can, and do, vary from film to film, which is fine as the whole thing's fiction anyway. But if the story's own mechanics are bent - or worse, ignored, then the film becomes nonsense on an internal level, because you can't make a good movie out of poor writing.
Now, the best example of how to do this properly would be Back To The Future. The story (across all three movies) is solid, and despite diagrams of alternate timelines, never tries to out-clever itself. The aforementioned Looper has a few minor hiccups, but manages to ride over them fairly smoothly, while About Time on the other hand, is pretty much broken from the get-go, but is such a good film away from the time-travel that it matters less, somehow.
And now we have Project Almanac, the well-meaning ADHD stepchild of the temporal-transit family. As I mentioned in my spoiler-free review, the film has some very interesting ideas, but is hampered by needlessly annoying cinematography and one other thing: the fact that the causality is utterly broken.
So, there are two main ways of illustrating the effects of time-travel, relating to events being altered in "the past". Springs and branches. Please, bear with me…
Spring Theory… …in which time, as we understand it, can be represented as a spring or coil. A single unbroken stream of events which begins at A and works its way inexorably to Z. In the spring, occurrences taking place at B, C and D will affect the status quo and influence the situations and occurrences at W, X and Y, on some large or small level. As the "present" progresses through the coiled spring, all events are influenced either by their state at Point A, or the interference of other events at later points.
Since time is effectively a single strand moving in a single direction, it is immutable. The illusions of chance and free will mask the fact that events were always destined to occur the way they did due to the chain-reaction of cause and effect. If we were to travel back to an earlier point in the spring and observe events remotely, we'd see that the choices made by individuals and the events we think of as 'random' would repeat themselves, as there are no external factors in the timeline to change either their inputs, present-circumstances, or their resulting outputs.
But if we could go back to an earlier point in the spring and change an event (in our perception), we'd create a loop whereby we were always going to interfere with the past-point, and so it would be altered even when we passed through it the first time as our younger selves. This is where we run the risk of creating a massive paradox, of course, as we'd still have to decide at a future point that there was an event which required changing, despite us already having fixed it in our own past.
Using the diagram above, if a traveller were to jump from point X to point C, irrespective of whether any physical or causal changes were made, the traveller will always have made that jump. When the jumper lived through point C the first time, they may not have seen themselves or noticed their own future-influence, but they were there nonetheless. The real quandary is that if the traveller does see their future self, it can act as a 'guarantee' that they'll live to the point in the future where they can jump back and be spotted. For example, if you saw your ten-years-older self today with your limbs, eyes and faculties as they are now, you could safely take up a hobby as a knife-thrower's assistant, base-jumper or crocodile wrestler. Under the spring-theory, this would make absolute sense.
As paradoxical as this scenario sounds, this is exactly what happens at the start of Project Almanac. The central character, David, discovers a video-recording of his 7th birthday party, recorded by his father, in which his 17yr old self briefly appears in a mirror. The reflection is picked up by the camera but un-noticed by everyone else in the room, so no-one was alerted to the anomaly at the time. At this part of the film, David and his group of friends have yet to build their time-machine, so using the diagram above, this puts David at point M, watching a recording of point C in which his future-self from point X is present. Whatever happens to David between point M and point X, he now knows he's going to build and use a time-machine, because in a single-strand reality, he always will. If David decides he wants to change the events at point C, he'll need to jump back to point B and intercept his first series of alterations to the timeline. Then again, if that was going to happen then it did/will-do anyway.
"What will be, has been" so to speak, and a coiled-spring timeline can only be altered in our perception, not in chronological reality...
Branch Theory… …in which time, as we understand it is represented as a fractal, or the branch of a tree. The branch only grows in one direction, forward, but splits at junctions creating co-existent realities as decisions are made, or more pertinently in the case of Project Almanac, as changes are made to the previously-existing course of events. This theory of time-travel is far more prevalent in cinema (Back To The Future being the best illustrated example).
This representation of time is infinitely changeable, and alterations to the past-timeline do not occur until a traveller jumps back and interferes in the chain of events, causing a branch-off in the continuity. It's also worth mentioning that in Project Almanac, the time-travellers inhabit their own separate bodies, which is to say that they don't leap into earlier versions of themselves (see About Time), but are their own discrete entities that can see each other.
If David's friend, Quinn jumps from point C(1) to A through Strand 1, in order to make an alteration to the timeline, he'll then set a new course of events in motion, Strand 2. Strand 1 still occurred, in order for him to be present again at point A, but Strand 2 will now exist as well. Whether the jumper from C(1) will 'return' to point C(1) or to point C(2) is pure conjecture, but C(2) is the one that most time-travel movies are built upon.
This new stream of events will continue in parallel to the old one, with the jumper having a memory of the old timeline (branch 1), the memory of jumping and making the change, and (presumably) the lived-through memory of the new timestream upon returning to the altered 'present'. If Quinn then decides he doesn't like the result of his alteration and wants to undo his change, he'll have to leap back from C(2) to A and prevent his Stream 1 self from creating Stream 2. Although this will, in theory, create a Stream 3 which will be hopefully so close to Stream 1 that the difference is negligible.
(for the record, it's not clear how the newly created realities and cross-strand travellers interact in Project Almanac. At one point the group return to their 'present' after visiting the Lollapalooza festival only to find they have no knowledge of the timeline in the newly created strand, and they still remember the 'old' sequence of events. Yet within the same act, the group discuss travelling further back to prevent their visit to the festival, and claim they'll then lose the memory of being there - despite having already visited it in one reality. It's inconsistent, but it's not my main point of contention with the film. Again, see my amnesia theory in the About Time review.)
Now again, as paradoxical as this sounds, this is exactly what happens in the second act of Project Almanac. On their first (their very first) time-jump one day into the past, Quinn takes the group to the house (indeed, bedroom) of his sleeping-self. He pulls out a marker and says "I always wanted to try this since I saw it in Looper*1", before drawing a smiley-face on the neck of his sleeping past-self counterpart. As he draws the face it also simultaneously appears, line by line, on his own neck, illustrating that he's split the timeline and has created a strand whereby he has Sharpie-ink on him for the day leading up to the first time-jump.
The group jumped from the stream without the neck-graffiti and into the one with it. The only way to undo this would be for a traveller to come back from later in the newly-created stream and somehow prevent the doodling. Quinn would then not have the face on his neck, but because of the interference would still be inhabiting a third timestream. The first and second strands still exist on the tree, but are unreachable since any attempt to cross the branches only creates more…
Still with me?
Good. Now, problem with the time-travel mechanism in Project Almanac is that it uses (as exemplified) both of these theories. Either of them can be used within a story (it's fiction, after all), but they're counter-intuitive to the point where you can't have both.
Scenario 1: If the story is based on Spring-theory, then David can see his future-self in the video of his past-self, because that chain of events was always going to happen, and his watching of the video is part of that chain. But if that's the case then traveller-Quinn would have had the smiley-face drawn on his neck before he's shown drawing it on sleeper-Quinn, because it was always going to be drawn on there several hours before the jump.
Scenario 2: If the story is based on Branch-theory, then traveller-Quinn can draw on his sleeping younger-self and have the doodle show up on his own neck as he creates an alternate timestream. But if that's the case then David won't see his future-self in the video of his past-party because his present-self hasn't yet reached the part of the time-stream where he can create the fork. The video he watches in the loft will be of Stream 1, as David's still in Stream 1 and hasn't reached the point where he can create Stream 2 (and the Stream 1 party-tape will always be the Stream 1 party-tape; David's appearance in the mirror will be in the Stream 2+ tape).
Scenario 3: The writers of Project Almanac didn't spend long enough working out the mechanics of their own narrative device. It's not a clever "paradox", it's a flat-out inconsistency.
Oh, and while I'm on, when David jumps back to the 'before the world ends' sequence again to stop himself being a stupid klutz with the girl he fancies, where does first-David go?. The incidents with Quinn's bedroom and Jessie in the alleyway show us that two of the same person will exist in the same timeline, so where was klutz-David when smooth-David was on the pull? What, did he send himself off to get some candy-floss, or something?
I must have done, because I don't normally spend anywhere near this amount of time writing about the movies I don't like…
If you're as fixated on the mechanics of time-travel as I am? Probably.
It's a rental, really.
Can't really say, but I hope not.
WELL I THINK I'VE ALREADY ANSWERED THAT ONE, DON'T YOU?
I won't, oddly.
There ain't.
David's dad, Ben is played by Gary Weeks, who had a small role in Anchorman 2, as did Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford.
*1 Amazingly, writers Andrew Deutschman and Jason Pagan have chosen to homage Looper by referencing the one aspect of the film which clearly doesn't work, making changes to the timeline which would alter the future to the point where the changer wouldn't then be present to execute them. It's almost as if they didn't understand Looper, or just didn't care.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
This is a spoiler-free review of the film. If you've watched Project Almanac and would like to read a 2,000 word deconstruction of why its time-travel mechanism is inherently broken, I've written one here. Thanks!
An uneasy feeling passed over the audience in Screen 4 on Friday afternoon, as the first two trailers in front of a hesitantly-anticipated time-travel movie turned out to be for Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (an unwarranted sequel to an affable, if pointless, second-tier frat-pack comedy) and Terminator Genisys (an unwarranted reboot/sequel to a series which should probably have just stopped after the second film, to be fair). Were the ads for these dodgy spin-offs supposed to be a pre-emptive strike at a restless audience? 'Hey, no matter how shit the film turns out to be, you can always look forward to the cinematic beige-wallpaper of Rob Corddry and Jason Clarke in the other time-travel flicks this year!' Or were the trailers a soft target for the film to lord it over? 'Hey, never mind their tired old middle-aged bullshit; this here is going to be REAL time-travel with kids like YOU!'Neither was an appealing proposition, frankly.
So, Project Almanac follows a group of science-nerd friends as they discover the plans to make a time-machine, plus an indicator that they're destined to see it through to completion. As the group travel to various points in the past, their changes create ripples which change the present they return to, and they soon have to formulate a plan to restore the integrity of the timeline. Because naturally, the first thing you'd do when using your time-machine for the first time is knowingly break the first rule of time-travel…
Sounds so-so, right? Well for the most part it's perfectly adequate, if undemanding, fare. The origin of the time-machine is sketched out with enough detail to suggest that it's plausible in-movie, but vaguely enough to avoid explaining how it would actually work*1. 'The Rules' and their logistics, however, are a even less rigorous, and will be the subject of another review-post full of spoilers and complaining. The story as a whole is a lot more accomplished than the film itself, despite the script's frequent assurances that it knows what it's talking about. I have neither the qualifications nor experience to call-out the pseudo-scientific bullshit thrown at the camera in the 'technical' scenes, but I've seen enough movies to be able to smell a mile away.
The biggest problem for me, though, was the camera-work. The opening "MTV Films" ident should have been a warning, but the whole movie is presented as found-footage, meaning everything is shot in messy, juddery first-person. The film's opening scenes are shot on our hero's sister's cellphone (which has cinema-grade resolution for obvious reasons), with much of the footage switching to the video camera they discover in the loft (and to be honest, the most unbelievable aspect of the film is that David's father owns a video camera which maintains its battery charge-level after lying untouched for ten years. Mind needs topping up after a couple of days). Aside from the horrible, horrible sight of handheld video being projected on a cinema screen, the problem is that it doesn't need to be presented that way. Other than a plot device which sees the characters watch the footage they've shot, there's no reason at all for the audience to be watching it through their digital devices.
And while I'm on, 1) the camera used to remotely film the 'before the world ends' scene wouldn't have picked up the dialogue across a festival-field, and 2) how come when David's sister Christina puts the camera down so that they can all be in-shot together, the camera keeps swaying like it's still being hand-held? If you can't do something properly, don't do it at all.
Elsewhere, the Project Almanac features plenty of time-travel references and in-jokes. Doctor Who is mentioned in the script, and at one point the gang are researching the technicalities of their project by watching Bill & Ted. Back To The Future doesn't get a namecheck, but the film does feature a red toy car, a blackboard in the workshop and a struggle-to-connect-the-cables homage. You can't say the film's not self-aware, at least. Although I know I'm a middle-aged man when a movie's visual illustration of "OMG you're in the PAST!" is everyone walking around using flip-phones…
But despite all my moaning (and I assure you, there's more of that to come), I did quite enjoy it. An interesting experiment even if it can't be classified as an outright success, and best filed alongside Chronicle.
If you're a fan of time-travel movies in general, you'll at least get some entertainment out of Project Almanac. If you're a fan of structured storytelling and coherent scripting, maybe just watch Back To The Future again?
Cheap Tuesday / Orange Wednesday.
Rent it. The causality is so inconsistent that it'll fry your brain if you attempt to re-watch the film.
Don't know I'm afraid as this was the first time I'd met the young cast.
Chief time-meddler David is played by Jonny Weston, who also starred in Taken 3 with Qui-Gon Jinn himself, Liam Neeson.
*1 It's to Project Almanac's credit that it doesn't explain how the time machine actually works. Although to be fair, it has a hard enough job just explaining how time works, so…
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Now I do love this film. The penultimate Orange Wednesdays saw me giving it a much promised second-whirl in the company of Mrs Blackout, who was also very impressed. Through writing and direction, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn once again take a genre which is very much alive and kicking, and still manage to add an extra layer of energy, dynamism and style. The characters in Kingsman may live in an exaggerated comic-book world, but they think, speak and act like they're from our own.
And yet… there were a couple of things which caught my attention the first time I watched the film, and a second-pass has done little to reassure me that I imagined them. Those things were two of the film's five female characters*1, or more importantly, the way the screenplay treats those characters. To wit…
Roxy Poor, poor Roxy. So, you've built your story solidly and expertly around The Hero's Journey, especially as it takes the Knights of Camelot as its main reference-point, and your screenplay is looking particularly badass. But this is 2015, and do-gooding, liberal film critics may well raise an eyebrow at your sausage-fest of a film if it doesn't include some of The Lady Characters. Your evil villain's assistant is female, and gets to do the lion's share of the physical fighting (note to casting director: try and get The Girl One from StreetDance 2), and even has minimal dialogue. You've also cast The Princess role, but the plot dictates that she's pretty much out of the way for most of the film (more on that later), so what to do? Hire Sigourney Weaver as the head of your organisation? No, the Kingsman agency itself is supposed to be deeply traditionalist, so would be led by middle-class white men. But we could include some ass-kicking young ladies in the intake-group, right?
Enter Roxy. A character who is both the perfect solution to the conundrum, and yet also massively out of place (by which I mean that the film doesn't seem to be able to place her). Many another screenplay would have presented Roxy as the love interest, but that isn't even suggested in The Secret Service. Smart, capable and loyal, Roxy is one of two young women to be proposed as candidates for the Kingsman training programme, and undergoes the same trials as the male entrants. Furthermore, she passes them all, becoming the first female Kingsman agent (although this is merely implied rather than outright stated). And what is Roxy's reward for this achievement? Well, her validity is cemented by being given a male codename, Lancelot, and then being sent to the ends of the Earth (literally) for the film's final reel in a sub-mission which is rendered pointless less than five minutes later, so that she can parachute back to terra firma while The Men Ones do all the work.
Roxy's 'Lancelot' codename, is admittedly a legacy-situation. The organisation operates on a strict one-in/one-out system, and new candidates assume the pseudonym of their predecessor. Although this doesn't change the fact that fuddy-duddy chief of affairs Arthur (Michael Caine) still insists on Roxy taking a man's name before she can do a man's job. I'd have thought that maybe some play on Guinevere might have been a progressive move, but apparently not. Well not in this film, anyway. By the closing credits, the Kingsman setup has been all but razed, and maybe that was the point. Much like the Jedi Council, this well-meaning order had become anachronistic and needed to be burned to the ground so that it could be rebuilt. Time - and sequels - will tell on that front.
But yes, a brief skydiving segment in the second act establishes Roxy's discomfort with aerial acrobatics, and only seems to set up her role at the film's climax: To ascend via two weather balloons to the very edge of the Earth's atmosphere so that she can take out the evil Valentine's communications satellite with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. That's badass though, right? Well, she undertakes this sub-mission alone after minimal briefing from Merlin (Mark Strong). He exposits the mission, waves her off, then flies Eggsy into a mountain-base in a private jet. At the crucial moment with radio-interaction (and complete with to-the-second countdown), Roxy does indeed manage to destroy the satellite, preventing a psycho-trigger-wave being broadcast around the world. Well done, Roxy (sorry, Lancelot)! But because the film can't end on that note, Richmond Valentine is then informed by his assistant that a Chinese comms satellite is nearby, which could piggy-back the message instead. A quick phone call later (literally) and this happens, meaning the carnage is back on for the film's climax. By this point, the weather balloons have burst, the single missile has been fired, and Roxy gets to miss the rest of the film as she parachutes back to a deserted snow-field, feeling as if she's been given something valuable to do.
Kingsman essentially sets out to prove that gender isn't an issue when it comes to being a secret agent, and then quietly reassures everyone that it is (the film's other female potential-operative, Amelia is despatched early on and later revealed to have been transferred to Berlin to do some filing. I'm not even making that up). It's almost as if so much time was spent on Sofia Boutella's Gazelle character (although not enough to name her on-screen, iirc), that all the other ladies had to take a back seat. Speaking of which…
Princess Tilde Poor, poor Tilde. As Richmond Valentine works him megalomaniacal charm, influence and intimidation on the Western world's leaders, the only ones to receive speaking roles (the back of an Obama-like's head doesn't count) are the Swedes, who most viewers outside of Sweden won't know anything about (to be fair, neither do I. Look, that's not a deal-breaker). Sweden is represented by a weasely Prime Minister (Bjørn Floberg) who quickly accedes to Valentine's plan, and the younger, more attractive and more female Princess Tilde (Hanna Alström), who is shown to be principled but far more naive. This results in a short scene in which Gazelle gets to show off her blades before Tilde is incarcerated for the rest of the movie. She is literally The Princess locked in The Castle that The Knight gets to rescue. That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself given the rest of the structure, but other than a brief cameo one act later, she's essentially an afterthought.
To the screenplay's credit Tildeisn't presented as a prize for Eggsy, The Knight. he doesn't even know she's there until he discovers her locked in her cell after a firefight. But how does a psychologically traumatised young woman respond to the face of a stranger at her cell-door who claims he'll free her once he's taken care of something more important elsewhere in the complex? She offers him bum-sex, of course (literally)! To the screenplay's shame, then she becomes the prize for The Knight! I know I may be reading too much into this, but it's so out-of-kilter with the rest of the film that I'm amazed the exchange made it to the final edit. But it did, and Eggsy's eyes light up as he hurries off to kill Richmond Valentine and return with a bottle of champers and two glasses, the old romantic devil.
What actually amazed me wasn't so much that a character in a film in 2015 with actual speaking lines is reduced to an orifice, but that Eggsy - The Knight - is absolutely fine with this. Not only is the princess's character immeasurably cheapened by what I assume is a throwaway gag, but so is Eggsy's. His mentor, Galahad has spent the last two hours instilling a sense of honour, courtesy and gentlemanly conduct in his protégé, and even when Eggsy and Gazelle have their final showdown, they do so on equal terms (breaking the cinematic cliche of The Girl Goodie being left to take out The Girl Baddie*2). Before the fiim's climactic sequence, when our hero emerges into the private jet's lounge area in a bespoke suit with bespoke weaponry, we know his training is complete; Eggsy isn't just a man now, he's a gentleman. The kind of gentleman who'll be right up for a bit of backdoor action with a vulnerable stranger, apparently. You can take the boy out of South London…
But wait, James Bond used to get the girl too, didn't he? How many of those movies ended with James and his new flame enjoying some downtime whilst his superiors looked, red-faced, into their radio equipment? Well correct me if I'm wrong, but James had actually been on a bit of an adventure with those ladies, hadn't he? He'd spent the film with them and they'd got each other out of a few scrapes along the way. No-one was seriously expecting the shrieks and groans emanating from a parachute-draped dinghy to be the start of a long-term relationship, but James had done more than pull up at a bus stop, wind his window down then ask 'I've just saved the world love, how much?'
So the sequence which was no-doubt intended to be a 21st century redux of the Cheeky Spy Movie Ending has turned out to be a rather blunt instrument. The sort of thing I'd expect in a Seth Rogen/Danny McBride spy movie, not from the people who wrote the last two X-Men flicks…
+ + + + +
I expect more. More tact, more decorum, more… well, writing. As I said at the start, these points in no way ruin the film for me, but they do bother me, and what was initially a quick 'what if?' post has turned into a borderline rant. But if you've made it to the bottom of a review which was clearly marked spoilers then you've probably already seen the film, in which case I'd love your take on these (and any other) issues. There's the comments-box below or the WoB Facebook page, take your pick.
Seriously though, Kingsmanis still great.
Despite my moaning above, yes.
Well if I haven't put you off completely, it's a buyer.
Again, despite my moaning above, it's a bloody strong contender, yes.
It does.
Well after a post like that, it's difficult to say really.
I think there might be. In the film's opening sequence when the helicopter launches a missile at the castle, not the first central explosion, but the second one that takes place to the left of it: I think it's there but low in the mix. If anyone could confirm, that'd be lovely thanks.
Oh, other than starring Mace Windu and Luke Skywalker, you mean? Well, Kingsman stars Colin Firth who starred in Love Actually along with Qui-Gon Jinn himself, Liam Neeson. Firth also appeared in Nanny McPhee and Bridget Jones's Diary alongside Celia Imrie, aka Naboo pilot Bravo 5 from The Phantom Menace. Still don't believe me? Okay, Colin Firth was in the rebooted St. Trinians' films the second of which starred David Tennant, whose most famous sci-fi role is of course the Jedi lightsaber construction droid Huyang in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
*1 Well, five female characters with actual speaking-lines. I mean, it's not really a lot, is it? Blade-wielding badass Gazelle, Roxy and Amelia from the Kingsman training-camp intake, Eggsy's mum Michelle, and Princess Tilde. The Bechdel Test can't even get its foot in the door if only two of those characters are even in the same room at the same time, never mind speaking to each other.
*2 Although again, that's only because at this point in the film, The Girl Goodie has been left on a mountainside waiting for The Men to come and pick her up from her time-wasting mission.
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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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