Red Sparrow

Alternate Title:  Trigger Warning

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A ballet dancer becomes a Russian spy at a specialized training school, before being assigned to uncover the identity of a mole in the Russian intelligence service.

Things Havoc liked: The whole point of seeing one movie a week is that I get to see everything I want to, and nothing I don't, something I continuously remind the people who insist that I go see godawful pieces of obvious crap for their amusement. Overall, this system has worked well for me, but it's not perfect, as occasionally the movies stack up in such a way that I miss something I was hoping to catch. So it was with Red Sparrow, a spy thriller that looked, according to the trailers, like a cross between Atomic Blonde and the Black Widow movie that Marvel has been threatening to make for quite some time, all starring one of my favorite working actresses. So when, recently, I had a chance to double back and actually catch this one, I was excited to have a chance to do so?

So what did I think? I think the trailer house responsible for this one are filthy, filthy liars.

Why? Because Red Sparrow is not what it was sold to me as. It is not some kind of spy thriller romp through the badass parts of spydom. No, sir, it's something entirely different, and this fact is something anyone considering the movie needs to bear in mind. Red Sparrow has nothing to do with Black Widow or Spygame or other movies about the cool parts of spywork, it instead draws inspiration from two places: John leCarre movies about the bland, thankless, awful parts of real spywork, and I Spit on Your Grave.

Yeah, the Trigger Warning above was real, folks. Dig in.

Red Sparrow, based on an award-winning novel from a former CIA operative, is about a Russian ballerina named Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence), who, following a career-ending injury, is forced by her connected uncle to join the ranks of spy workers, called Sparrows, who train in the arts of seduction, emotional manipulation, and general ruthlessness to advance the Russian policy of "Kompromat" (the discovery and exploitation of compromising material on foreign assets) by means of (I'm not making this word up) "Sexpionage". Everything is portrayed in as realistic a manner as possible, from the dehumanizing training methods, to the constant one-eye-over-your-shoulder means by which such agents are required to go about their actual work, with very little to look forward to beyond being dragged back home for an even more dehumanizing "debriefing"/interrogation. It should be said that Lawrence is very good at portraying all of this (even if her Russian accent is less only slightly more convincing than Scarlett Johanson's). She nails the paranoia and helplessness of the character, who is in a position wherein staying alive for five more minutes is contingent on her willingness to do unspeakable, disgusting things, and where the danger comes not from the CIA, but from her own handlers.

As you can imagine, this all makes Red Sparrow a very bleak movie, something director Francis Lawrence (Hunger Games, Constantine) takes as many pains as possible to reinforce. The color palate is all muted greys and overcast, icy landscapes, the sterile confines of doctors' offices and the dingy interiors of FSB black sites. Characters are constantly being forced to strip naked and cast aside moral distinctions, to do one disgusting, vile task after another, to seduce one another and spy on each other for the slimmest of political advantages. The music (Longtime Lawrence collaborator James Newton Howard) is dour and laden with pregnant minor chords, building an air of paranoia across the board. It's a quintessential film school movie, ultimately, where all the elements reinforce the tone of the thing, and are available to be broken down into their constituent parts so that essays like these ones can be written about them.

Things Havoc disliked: Which is all well and good, but we're not in film school here, we're here to talk about movies to see and movies to avoid, and all that bleakness is going to (hell, HAS) resulted in a big old warning sign being stapled on the film for a considerable number of people.

Look, I'm no enemy to bleak films. I thought Wind River was one of the best movies of last year. But there needs to be a point to all of it for such movies to be worthy of a recommendation, and Red Sparrow... struggles to find one. I know that the practice of spywork resembles John leCarre more than it does James Bond. I know that real spywork is not glamorous but thankless, boring busiwork carried out by mediocre men in airless rooms. I know all these things because fifty different films from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold onwards have taught me them, and so I need something beyond "Being a spy sucks" to justify being dragged through it all once again, especially when the film in question advertises itself as being a fun spy romp in the style of Salt. I've always said that it's not fair to criticize a movie for not being another movie, but it is fair to criticize a movie for not being the movie it pretended to be during the marketing push, and Red Sparrow sets off that alarm loud and clear.

Ultimately, the movie is just not enjoyable in a way that fun spy romps are made to be. It is a cryptic, difficult movie to penetrate, one that ultimately proves not as intelligent as it thinks it is, nor does it have any of the sense of trashy fun that might have elevated the material into a must-watch. Everything in the movie is done competently, but nothing about it demands to be seen, justifying the awful lengths to which the actors and characters are put with some kind of haunting, thought-provoking, or simply gripping story in some regard. Instead we get to watch a bunch of characters put through hell for a corrupt spy agency that hates them and then we get to go home. Fun times at the local cineplex?

Final thoughts:   I'm never sure what to do with movies like Red Sparrow, which are well-made films, but ultimately not very enjoyable to the viewer. In part, it seems unfair to give them low scores, as the movies are, as I mentioned, well-structured and shot, but at the same time, I go to the movies to be entertained, and there isn't much in terms of entertainment value to a movie this grim for this little purpose. Fully half of the people I watched this one with walked out of it, simply uninterested in putting themselves through the thing for any further length of time, when the reward was simply going to be a moral of "Spywork sucks". As such, the best I can do is suggest that you make your own mind up as to whether Red Sparrow is a good one for you, and move on to the next movie.

Final Score:  6/10

Next Time:  Jodie Foster has a bad day in Los Angeles

Spectre

Alternate Title:  Staggeringly Putrid Excrement Created by TRepanation Enthusisasts

One sentence synopsis:     James Bond tracks down the mysterious architect of the events he has been investigating, as well as the shadowy criminal organization he heads.


A Note Before We Begin: Try as we might to avoid it, it became impossible to discuss this film rationally without resorting to SPOILERS. Do not read this review if you are desperate to avoid having a major plot-point spoiled for you.


Things Havoc liked: There are different rules for Bond films. We all know this. Bond is its own genre by now, with 24 movies spanning fifty years of spies, gadgets, seduction and daring-do. The most recent one of these was Skyfall, and I liked it a hell of a lot, a new beginning for a Bond series that has been many things over the course of its half-century lifespan, one that left the series open to any sort of followup the filmmakers wanted. Coming off a sterling performance by Javier Bardem as the previous installment's villain, and with the news that legendary German Tarantino-collaborator Christoph Waltz was to be taking his place as the evil criminal mastermind of Bond's most famous nemesis-organization, I was stoked to see this movie. Like with Skyfall, this seemed to promise the best combination of an excellent Bond (Daniel Craig is in the conversation for the best in the role, as far as I'm concerned), a brilliant villain (go see Inglorious Basterds if you want to know how well Waltz can play this sort of material), and a sleek, modern interpretation of the dynamic between Bond and his foes showcased through three previous movies, two of which were sort of brilliant and the last of which was merely okay. I have to see something every week, rain or shine, hell or high water, doldrums or Oscar season, but sometimes this blog writes itself. Bond was back. It was time to enjoy.

Things Havoc disliked: What the fuck was that?

Spectre is, without question in my mind, one of the most staggering, incomprehensible failures in moviemaking that I have ever seen. It is a disaster, a terrible film on both the level of a standalone action movie and the level of a Bond film, modern or otherwise. Comparing films to their predecessors may be gauche, but this is James Bond, a movie series with heft to it, and more importantly, one that had just finished a rousing triumph in the form of Skyfall, and for the filmmakers to follow Skyfall up with this, makes for perhaps the greatest collapse in quality between one film and another in the same series since Highlander 2: The Quickening. It is a terrible movie, no matter how you wish to slice it or what excuses you wish to give, and if you want to find out why, then we have to start with a little digging...

Bond films have always been silly, we know this. Sometimes, as in many of the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan films, they are more overtly so, and sometimes, as with Craig or Timothy Dalton's showcases, there is an attempt made to ground them in a grittier reality, but even when we're dealing with the former case, the silliness of Bond films comes from how over-the-top they are. Laser death traps, girls with ludicrous names, exotic henchmen with signature weapons, evil masterminds who could just kill Bond but prefer to monologue about their evil plan first, these things are staples of the series because they fit the series, or at least fit the movies they are in. Scaramanga works in Man with the Golden Gun because he's established as being an eccentric perfectionist who locks Bond in a dueling arena on his private island because his goal is to defeat Bond in a dueling arena on his private island. Jaws is a giant hitman with metal teeth because we are inhabiting a world with giant hitmen with metal teeth, same with Oddjob and Xenia Onnotop and Pussy Galore and all the rest. You don't drop villains like that into a movie like Casino Royale or License to Kill, at least not unless you intend to make terrible Bond films (Die Another Day comes to mind). So what do these filmmakers do? They get Christoph Waltz, a man who never found scenery he couldn't dine on, and tell him to play Ernst Blofeld (the reveal of which is treated like some grand dramatic thing, even though there is no context for who the hell that is within any of the previous films), zapping at Bond with some contraption of indeterminable purpose, or stashing him within elaborate death traps that he can easily escape, all while the other half of the movie is trying to be a Kathryn Bigelow-esque mediation on surveillance societies and privacy-infringing intelligence resources, material it plays so straight as to strangle all potential for any fun.

But I'm afraid blaming a tonal clash for this film's woes doesn't even scratch the surface. Plenty of movies have tried to be all things to all people, and some of them were even decent. This film however doesn't just fail on the level of ideas that clashed with one another, but because the ideas themselves that they are trying to fuse are BAD IDEAS. The movie goes all-out, trying to convince us that everything from the last three Bond films was leading up to this, all the events of the previous movies were orchestrated by some shadow-organization who is now being revealed, because hey, it's 2015, and we want every movie to be The Avengers now, right? Well Avengers managed that because they were A: Dealing with comic book characters, with strongly-defined archetypical characters, traits, and stories, and B: Marvel spent a goddamn decade building the world they would inhabit up through a whole series of previous films explicitly geared towards this end. You can't short-cut your way through that process by taking the three previous, barely-connected films, waving your hands at any muddled aspects of them that didn't make sense, and claiming that the very lack of specificity to some of the plot details we barely remember was all part of your brilliant plan. The effect is so tendentious as to be laughable, as the movie vainly tries to pretend that this was the plan all along, and when it fails (and oh, does it fail), turning around and doing something you only see when a movie has suffered a tremendous failure at the most fundamental level:

WARNING! SPOILERS LIE BELOW! DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN UNSPOILED!

Making the villain a relative of the hero, about whom we have heard nothing previously, in a vain attempt to force some "emotional resonance" into the conflict between them without actually going through the trouble of establishing anything.

Yes, this is a film wherein it turns out that all of the events of the three previous Bond films happened because James Bond's step-brother, whom we have never heard of, became the literally greatest criminal in the world just so that he could torment James Bond and ruin his life through a series of hopelessly lame setpieces and death traps. And we are expected to swallow this despite there being no evidence in any of the previous movies (or frankly, in this one), that anything of the sort was being planned. The transparency of this ploy within the film is so stark as to stagger belief. It is like claiming that you did not kill that man moments after walking into the room with a machete, and, in front of seventeen witnesses, killing that man.

But fine, the plot is stupid beyond belief. Bond movies have survived that much before. What makes this movie fall totally to pieces? Everything else. The action, one staple of Bond films you can usually count on, is staggeringly inept, boring as all get out, with no energy, style, or interest to it. Remember Casino Royale? Its opening sequence, its fight in the bathroom or the parkour-heavy scene in the construction yard? Remember that silent, silhouetted fight scene from Skyfall, the one that took place against the backdrop of a ten-story neon sign? Well forget all that shit, we've got some of the most boring, pace-less, spectacle-free action you've ever seen here. Even Bond doesn't look interested as he lazily shoots down his targets. The fucking climax of the movie involves him firing a pistol at a helicopter while not being menaced even slightly. What is this, some attempt to drop Blofeld and Bond's wackiness into a John leCarre book? Even the henchman, usually a reliable source of fun in a Bond movie, is a hulking cypher of an irrelevancy played by Dave Bautista, who was awesome in Guardians of the Galaxy as Drax the Destroyer because that was a good movie made by skilled filmmakers with a brilliant script. This film, possessed of none of those qualities, makes him into Generic big tough guy number 18, to the point where it wasn't until after he had died that I realized his death sequence was supposed to be a major setpiece of the film.

And what of the Cast, the quality of the film I usually lead with? Useless. Léa Seydoux may be gorgeous, but she is simply a bad actress, something I've determined before from films as varied as The Grand Budapest Hotel and Farewell My Queen. Honestly, the problem here though isn't her, but the character written for her, a generic useless pretty person who has no actual point in either the story or the "grand plot" of the films, and yet whom we are supposed to believe Bond falls in love with to the point where he is willing to give up the life of an itinerant spy. The classic Bond girls of yesteryear were silly, yes, and there as eye candy, but they were also KGB spies and secret assassins and exotic heiresses looking for vengeance in their own right, and when Bond slept with them, you could see what it was that he found compelling. This one is a shrinking violet of no use to anyone, whose character arc is transparently used as an excuse to get her captured, again and again, so that Bond can have a dilemma. Monica Bellucci, meanwhile, about which so much was made prior to the film's release, that there would finally be an older Bond Girl, is basically not in the movie at all, and during the two minutes she does spend there, she accomplishes exactly zero, save of course for being seduced by Bond during her husband's funeral. We've discussed Waltz and Craig, both of whom look flat-out embarrassed to be there, but we also should bring up Ralph Fiennes, who has the unenviable task of basically playing Alec Baldwin's character from Mission Impossible 5 without the compensating quality of being Alec Baldwin. Andrew Scott, meanwhile, who played Morarty on the BBC's Sherlock, gets to play the evil government official who wants to activate a domestic spy program to rule the world, an idea that seems to come out of nowhere except the filmmaker's desire to pretend that this BOND FILM is actually a deep mediation on the questions of our times. Admittedly, this is the sort of shit that worked in Captain America 2, mostly because that movie starred Captain America, was written by someone who had seen a movie in the last thirty years, and was also entirely about the subject in question, rather than tacking it on as a B-plot to impress those who believe we can't have a spy movie that isn't also about how evil espionage is. This film meanwhile is so incompetently-made that we are treated to actual scenes in which Scott stands before his adversaries and sneers at them that they are clearly too naive weak for the modern world because they "are stupid enough to believe in... *scoff*... democracy!".

Final thoughts:    Spectre is not just a bad movie, but the worst kind of bad movie, a movie so bad that it makes me retroactively hate other movies related to it that I previously liked. I praised the hell out of Skyfall when it first came out, but reflecting on the thunderous mess that is Spectre makes me realize that the flaws that destroyed this film were present in its predecessor as well, waiting to strike once the filmmakers ran out of good ideas and threw their hands up in the air. That Sam Mendes, who made American Beauty, Jarhead, and Skyfall itself, was the director of this film, tells me that something went fantastically wrong early on in the process, to the point where nobody, not the cast, not the producers, not Mendes, and not the scriptwriters, were able to salvage anything from it. And yet to present this movie as some kind of Avengers-style capstone to a series that was plainly not aiming in this direction beforehand is a move so shameless that I can only describe it as contemptible. This is a film that tells you that the movies you watched before were other than what they were, and rather than try and figure out what made them popular, prefers to re-write them for the worse so as to peddle lazy swill before you, confident that an action movie in November is unlikely to have much competition.

I get a lot of flak every time I pan a stupid action movie, from people who claim that I am simply failing to get into the "spirit" of the thing by turning my brain off and enjoying the spectacle. While I would point out that you are speaking to the guy who liked both Kingsman and Fast & Furious 7, my counter is not so much that I don't have high expectations, but that a stupid action movie that wants to coast on its action and fun should probably include fun action. And when the film does not include fun action because fun is stupid and all movies have to rip off other successful movies regardless of whether their formulas are compatible, then they should not expect mercy from me when it comes time to review the quality of their work, particularly not when their only recourse is to try and convince me that movies I liked weren't all that good in the first place.

Final Score:  2.5/10

Next Time:  A movie this bad demands a retreat to the indie theaters for something a little... different...

Bridge of Spies

Alternate Title:  Saving Captain Powers

One sentence synopsis:     An insurance lawyer from Brooklyn is asked by his company to defend a Soviet Spy in his trial, and by the US government to negotiate his exchange for American pilot Gary Powers.


Things Havoc liked: I really should not have to introduce Steven Spielberg to anyone. If he's not the greatest filmmaker of the modern age (and he probably is), then he's at least on the short list, alongside names like Scorsese, Kubrick, Myazaki, and Scott. Yeah, it's fashionable to denigrate his films as sentimental schlock and no, I've not loved everything that Spielberg has ever made (let us never speak of War Horse again), but make no mistake, Spielberg invented modern Hollywood cinema and has defined it, with revisions, for three and a half decades. When I was a child, he was my favorite director in the world, and now that I am an experienced film connoisseur who can discourse authoritatively on the works of Werner Herzog and Lars von Trier, Spielberg is still (probably) my favorite director in the world, and no amount of twaddle about the "infantilization of American filmgoers" (Peter Biskind can kiss my ass) will ever change that. So far, five years into this project, we have been twice presented by one of Spielberg's films, The Adventures of Tintin (which while not great, was pretty fun), and Lincoln (which while not fun, was pretty great). Now we have another offering before us, a cold war historical thriller of the sort that Spielberg has become increasingly fond of in recent years (Munich comes to mind) starring one of his favorite actors, Tom Hanks, and one of mine, Mark Rylance.

You do know who Mark Rylance is, don't you? A big-time British theater actor who specializes in Shakespeare on stage and television, whom I've not, admittedly, seen a whole lot of in my film-watching career, but I do remember. He was the only good thing in Anonymous, Roland Emmerich's godawful attempt to posit a monarchical conspiracy theory, and also the only good thing in The Gunman, a film that would have to find some ambition before it could become shit. Rylance plays real-life Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, not as any form of movie spy, but as an old, unfailingly polite man, who neither admits his espionage nor explains it, but holds fast to his allegiance without any real explanation as to why. We don't know a lot about Abel, why he became a spy, what his background is, what he hopes to gain from refusing the offers the CIA (understandably) makes to him involving turning double-agent. What little we do get from him is via his interactions with James Donovan, played by Spielberg's favorite actor, Tom Hanks, an insurance lawyer and (*gasp*) everyman good guy assigned to the defense of the accused spy, and following his conviction (spoiler alert), to the task of trying to arrange his exchange for a shot down spy pilot in Berlin.

So far, all I have told you is the plot of the movie and that actors you have or have not heard of are in it, so let me try and actually speak to something good here. Spielberg is one of the great directors after all, and his specialty (or one of them) is this exact sort of Americana period piece. It's no surprise then that the movie's decoration and sense of place is so spot on. Be it 1950s Brooklyn, or 1950s Berlin, the set dressing for this film is absolutely fantastic, neither layered with nostalgia nor over the top in its depiction of the dismal, ruined state of Berlin at the foundation of the Berlin Wall. The smoldering ruins that are all that is left of East Berlin (and would remain all that was left of it until 1989) are beautifully realized, as is the smoldering resentment of the East Germans themselves towards this state of affairs and the hand they have been dealt by global geopolitics in general. Indeed, the film is in no small part about this fact, as Donovan does not engage in spy games, Bondesque or otherwise, but simply shuttles between one part of Berlin and another, making contacts and struggling to understand, however he may, the interests of the various organizations that he has to deal with, Soviet, East German, American, and whatnot. This gets hilarious at times, from the thunderous, bufoonish bombast of the East German minister of... nobody quite knows what, to the tearful overacting of the "family" of the confessed spy, none of whom seem able to keep straight what their relationship with him is, and whose purpose in being foisted on Donovan in advance of his meeting is entirely opaque to us and to him. The take is very much Marx-Brothers-do-The-Cold-War, which is appropriate, given the level of false ambition endemic to spy agencies then (and now).

Things Havoc disliked: If it doesn't sound like I'm making a great case for this film so far, well... there's a reason.

Bridge of Spies, like many movies I can think of made by many good directors, is a film defined by what it is not. It is a spy movie that is not James Bond or Jason Bourne, all action and adventure, nor for that matter is it a John leCarre film about how everyone is evil and posturing and spycraft is useless. It is not a movie about the relationship between Donovan and his charge, though it touches briefly on that point, nor about the life and times of Captain Powers himself, on whose behalf all of this is being done, nor is it a biography of James Donovan, who was a real man who engaged in real negotiations of this sort, serving as an envoy between governments that were not able to recognize one another's existence. It's fine to want to make a movie different from its fellows by not being similar to them, but at a certain point, a movie actually has to BE something, and Bridge of Spies... isn't.

Consider the first half of the movie, which is an extended setup for the second, in which Donovan defends Abel against the charges of espionage, unsuccessfully. We know he is going to be unsuccessful, as the film was advertised to us as being about the negotiations which took place after Abel was convicted, which makes the entire hour of screentime spent watching him be convicted pretty damn pointless, as far as I'm concerned. Spielberg tries to insert some interest, by having a massive public backlash against Donovan for having defended a spy (which never happened), culminating in someone shooting into his house with a machine gun (which also never happened), following which point the police accuse him of being a traitor who deserved to have his family massacred (which I'm willing to predict never freaking happened). The entire event is a ham-fisted effort to ground the film in hysteria so as to wave neon signs to point to similar events from today, tendentious ones that don't fit the tone of the movie. Even if this sort of thing happened all the time in regards to terrorism suspects today (which it does not), Spielberg's inherent sentimentality turns the entire event into an after-school special on how condemning people without trial (which nobody ever considered doing) is a bad thing, because they might be innocent (which Abel isn't).

But lest this sound like another political axe of mine being ground at the expense of another movie, my objection isn't the politics of the film, but the pointlessness of it. More tension is brought to the fold later on, when it turns out the East Germans have seized some college student who strayed on the wrong side of the Wall, and now seek to scupper the impending spy trade by threatening to execute him. This did happen, and adds an interesting wrinkle into the situation before Donovan, but nothing is unfortunately helped by the fact that everyone else involved, CIA, GDR, KGB, or whatnot, are unspeakably stupid. The movie lets Donovan's CIA handler insist, over and over, that they should not exert themselves to save the kid without ever letting the CIA handler give a reason why (and there are reasons why). Unlike last year's Most Wanted Man, I don't think this is because Spielberg actually thinks the CIA are too stupid and evil to have a reason, but it's a diminishing of the film's stakes when we're presented the question of "Do we approve of the execution of innocent college students?" as though it's some kind of deep moral quandary. And lest the film sound biased, the movie manages to go so far over the top with the Eastern Bloc agencies that Donovan winds up having to explain to the East Germans that if they decide to blatantly scupper a deal between the USSR and USA, the Soviet Union, the country which occupies their own with the largest standing military force on the planet, might just get angry.

Final thoughts:    I certainly didn't dislike Bridge of Spies, but the film is almost relentlessly ephemeral, a non-entity of a movie that is, as always, quite difficult as a result to actually talk about. On the scale of Spielberg films, it rates along the lines of things like 1941 or Always, movies that are neither good nor interestingly bad. I barely recall the act of seeing it, just a couple of weeks ago, and will likely remember it even less the next time this project forces me back to the subject. It's a pity, because there's a good movie to be made from the story of Captain Powers, James Donovan, and Rudolf Abel, but given this thing, I think we'll have to wait on that one for another time, and frankly, another director.

Final Score:  5.5/10

Next Time:  Bond.  James Bond.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

Alternate Title:  Exactly What I Deserve

One sentence synopsis:     Ethan Hunt and the IMF must stop a group of international terrorists from destroying the world.


Things Havoc liked:  So... some of my long-time readers will remember that a couple years ago I reviewed the fourth film Mission Impossible series, a movie called Ghost Protocol for reasons that I doubt even the scriptwriter remembers now. If you don't recall this film, you shouldn't feel particularly bad about it, as the movie was an entirely forgettable affair, one of the most by-the-numbers action jobs I've ever reviewed, along the lines of movies like Killer Elite or The Equalizer. The film wasn't awful, just entirely forgettable, to the point where, absent a handful of moments and shots, I don't remember a damn thing about it, something unusual for me and my movie-watching. Middling films like MI:4 are difficult ones to review and to collate in my mind, not in the least because of the question of what to do when their sequels inevitably come out. Movies I love or hate are easy to decide upon when the next installment arrives, but with the prospect of MI:5 on the horizon, I was uncertain as to whether to see it or not. Ultimately it was the request of others that drove me to give it a chance. And so here we are.

So let's start, as is customary, with the high points. I don't recall exactly when Simon Pegg got into the Mission Impossible business, but he was the best thing in MI:4 and he remains the best part in its sequel, with a role that is considerably enhanced over the last time. Yes, he's still sort of comic relief, but he gets to play his role a bit straighter this time, with less stupid pratfall bullshit and more of a sense that, yes, this is supposed to be a superspy, despite everything. Pegg's hallmark has always been a very everyman sort of straight-man comedy (Hot Fuzz aside), and he seems to be almost aware of how absurd this series is, even as he plunges headlong through it. Pegg is also at the heart of the super-tech gadgetry that Mission Impossible has always been heavy on, a sort of combination of Q and the plucky sidekick. I won't call this Pegg's best role or anything, but it's a welcome sight to see entering a movie like this.

There are newcomers this time as well, both new to me and simply new to the series. Rebecca Ferguson is one of the former, and her role is that of the femme fatale, the female assassin/love interest of our dashing hero, Ethan Hunt, though admittedly the Mission Impossible series has always been a bit lighter on the seduction than the Bond films they clearly wish to be. All that means though is that Fergusson actually gets to act, which is a shade more than Halley Berry got to do during her turn as a Bond Girl. Fergusson is perfectly decent in the role, one that actually requires her to engage in her own action set-pieces at times (a knife fight between her and a giant bruiser late in the film is a particular high point), and while I'd hardly write her in for Scarlett Johansson, the field of actually effective action heroines is not so immense that I'm prepared to look gift horses in the mouth, as it were. And speaking of gift horses, we also get Alec Baldwin this time around, whom I love, and have always loved, even in the bad, bad movies that he made a habit of making during his misspent youth. Baldwin plays the director of the CIA, a man determined to get the IMF under some approximation of control by any means necessary, and though this does mean that Baldwin is simply reprising his douchebag-authority-figure role from such films as Glenngary Glenn Ross and The Departed (and 30 Rock), this is a character type that he is good at playing, and that I enjoy watching him play, irrespective of the circumstance.

Things Havoc disliked:  The fact that I keep using phrases like "irrespective of the circumstance" should probably give you a hint.

No, Mission Impossible 5 isn't awful, and no, I don't outright regret seeing it (Pixels was my alternative), but if I'm being brutally honest with myself, I should simply have known better. I went to see this movie because, of all people, my mother wanted to, as she wanted to see Tom Cruise and I had no better idea to suggest instead. As such, the results I received were entirely predictable from the get-go, given that the last movie, while also not receiving a properly failing grade, was so irrelevant to my greater moviewatching career that I announced at the conclusion of reviewing it that I would likely never think about it again, and proceeded to do just that until it came time to write this review?

So what's actually wrong here? The film is just boring. Long and boring, despite a two hour runtime and about eighteen different action setpieces. How this happened is beyond me. Christopher McQuarrie, whose writing and directing credits include The Usual Suspects, Edge of Tomorrow, Valkyrie, and Jack Reacher, all good films, most of them starring Tom Cruise. So what happened here? Was the weight of the mediocrity of this series so immense that McQuarrie couldn't do anything about it? Was Cruise ghost-writing the thing? Did everyone get swallowed by Scientology? I have no idea, and yet here we are.

Part of the problem is the returning cast, particularly two men I'm typically great fans of, Ving Rhames, and Jeremy Renner. Rhames hasn't been in a whole lot recently, and is more or less in this movie just because he was in the first one. He looks tired, uninterested, and simply bored, or perhaps I was simply projecting my own state. He does, however, manage to do better than Renner, who has a fairly comprehensive pedigree for action movies nowadays, and seems to have decided that this was the moment to channel his turn in the fourth Bourne film. I love Renner, but he's awful in this movie, having apparently mistaken the plot for one that is reasonable and speaks to deep truths in our modern world. He speaks in breathless tones on the phone and to his colleagues as though trying to put together the prosecution of the Nuremberg trials, and otherwise does more or less nothing except provide a cardboard cutout for Alec Baldwin to yell at.

But the cast is secondary in a movie like this, even in a good one, so if I'm being properly honest, the real problem here is the action, which is formulaic in all the wrong ways. Setpieces involve the usual Imperial Stormtrooper Academy of Marksmanship bullshit wherein our hero, running in a straight line down a hallway away from the enemy, cannot be hit by bullets, despite the six goons with machine guns firing at him for a minute and a half from ten yards away. A single motorcycle chase through the highways of Morocco manages to generate some interest, due to clever cinematographic tricks to highlight the speed our heroes are making, but all of the other chases, on foot, in cars, underwater, all of them suffer from the same old boring problems that they had in the previous film, fights without stakes, chases without purpose, a gratuitous swimming scene that is padded out by contrivances so obvious that the audience laughed at them before they happened. You know the feeling you get when you're about to get out of an unpleasant situation, a boring conversation or a staff meeting, and then, right at the end, someone does or says something that guarantees you are stuck there for another half hour at least? Half a dozen of the scenes in this movie contained elements that gave me that same reaction.

Final thoughts:   It's hard to write about movies like this, ephemeral movies that have no purchase on one's memory, better or worse. And yet despite the fact that they're basically the same film, I left Mission Impossible 5 far more annoyed than I had its predecessor. Part of that was simply that I wasted my time at a film I knew was unlikely to be good, but part of it was that, in a year such as this, with the glorious, transcendent action movies we have gorged upon for the last six months, there is simply no excuse for making a boring, routine action flick like this one, a movie that could easily have come out in 2004 for all it has learned. Even stupid action films like Fast & Furious 7 (and, if I'm being brutally honest, Kingsman), have evolved far beyond this, with new styles, scripts, pacings, and cinematic tricks designed to thrill audiences who have seen fare like the rest of the damn Mission Impossible series already and want to watch something entertaining. How this series keeps going the way it has, garnering the critical acclaim and audience adoration (my audience applauded the goddamn thing!) is entirely beyond me, but then I'm used, at this point, to being the smartest man in the room when I sit down to watch these weekly films.

Go see Mission Impossible 5 if you're curious, but it is exactly what you think it is. As it was exactly what I thought it would be. I, meanwhile, keep my code of only going to see movies I think might be good for a reason, ladies and gentlemen, and once in a while, it helps to remind myself of just what that reason is.

Final Score:  4.5/10

Next Time:  LeBron James and John Cena compete to see who can follow in The Rock's footsteps.

Spy

Alternate Title:  Earning the Asshole Badge

One sentence synopsis:     A CIA analyst is converted into a field agent after her partner is murdered by an arms dealer plotting to sell nuclear weapons to the highest bidder.


Things Havoc liked:  I don't see a huge number of comedies, if only because most comedies look insipid when viewed only from trailers. In consequence, I've not seen a lot of Melissa McCarthy's work, though like everyone else who's into film, I do know of her at the very least. What I know is not terribly flattering, as McCarthy seems to be trying to position herself as a female Danny McBride, a fat, loud asshole, who gets a bunch of laughs by virtue of acting like an unapologetic shithead to everyone in sight. Why this schtick is regarded as funny is beyond me, as I deal with enough assholes in my regular life to go and seek them out in a setting that, by the nature of film, will glamorize their assholery and hold them up as a shining example due to some mitigating factor, competence perhaps, or even just "telling it like it is". I cannot, as a rule, stand media cored around this sort of concept, one of the primary reasons why I could never watch House, but even with my most deeply-held prejudices, there are always exceptions. And with a week to kill before the launch of Jurassic World, which by the time of the writing of this review I should have already seen and be in mid-production of the review for, I opted this week to follow the recommendation of my sister, who saw this film in the company of both our mother and our octogenarian grandmother, and professed that not only did she enjoy herself, so did everyone else. My grandmother has... eclectic tastes at times, but given this report, I felt it behooved me to see what was going on, to see, if nothing else, if they had found a way to make me tolerate an archetype I roundly despise.

Well not to put too fine a point on it, but yes, yes they did.

How did they accomplish this miracle, you may be asking? Well they used one of the oldest tricks in the storyteller's book. If you're having trouble getting the audience to sympathize with an unlikeable character, you really have two options: either soften the character, or make everyone around them worse. Not content with doing things by half measures, experienced McCarthy-collaborator Paul Feig, director of this film as well as Bridesmaids and The Heat, decided this time to take the writer's job on as well and produced a script that does both. Far from being the customary loud-mouthed asshole, McCarthy's character, Susan Cooper, is established as being one small step away from a middle-aged cat lady (this joke is made explicitly and at length), a competent desk agent for the CIA who manages to disguise her greater ambitions under a mousy exterior, and who silently pines for her field-partner, super-spy Bradley Fine (Jude Law). Thrust into the role of field agent after Fine's murder and a contrivance concerning the leak of other agents' identities, McCarthy spends the first half of the movie or so alternately flustered or completely over her head, only easing into her customary abrasive personality over the course of the film. Not only is this waaaaaay more tolerable than spending the entire movie in the company of someone I'd rather shoot dead and bury in the desert, it also serves to give her a reason for being an insulting prick, as she is more or less forced to act this way in order to survive amidst cutthroats, killers, terrorists, and men with more testosterone than brains. What's more, to my (and seemingly everyone else's) surprise, McCarthy actually pulls off both sides of this character, convincingly appearing as a lovelorn loser as well as an ass-kicking super-spy. It probably helps that I don't have a lot of experience with her films, and thus don't automatically cringe when I see her face, but it's notable regardless, especially considering how many schtick comedians are consistently unable to operate outside their narrow repertoire (I'm looking at you, Will Ferrell).

But the real strength of Spy is the second element of the modifications that Feig made to the formula this time round, specifically the act of surrounding McCarthy with a bevy of gargantuan, staggering assholes, ones so much worse than she could possibly be that it becomes cathartically enjoyable to see McCarthy inflict herself upon them. One such asshole is Jason Statham, playing rogue super-spy Rick Ford in a very intentional send-up to other Jason Statham roles, a hyper-masculine, dim-witted, clenched-teeth badass-in-name-only, whose tales of his legendary awesomeness become more and more increasingly insane ("I once re-attached my severed arm with my other severed arm!") as the movie goes on. I've always admired Statham, even in bad movies, but he's flat out hilarious this time, playing a role that none of his Expendables cast-mates would ever dare try to pull off, a role that lampoons and heaps mockery upon every other thing he's done in his entire career. Only slightly less over-the-top is X-men First Class' Rose Byrne, playing the daughter of a Bulgarian warlord whom McCarthy must surveil in order to locate the MacGuffin that drives the plot. Byrne's character is a pastiche of the most arrogant form of Eurotrash imaginable, a thoroughly loathsome bitch whose conceit is so towering that McCarthy swinging in on a wrecking ball to demolish the entire edifice in classic fashion actually forms some of the best scenes in the entire movie. Smaller roles go to West Wing's Allison Janney, playing McCarthy's deadpan boss, to Phantom Menace's Peter Serafinowicz, playing a raunchy Italian agent inflicted on McCarthy throughout the film, and to British standup comedian Miranda Hart, playing McCarthy's friend, the only CIA agent in existence even more hapless than McCarthy herself. The movie also features a whole series of cameos, mostly well-executed, including one that serves to prove that my initial impressions from Escape Plan were correct, and 50 Cent is simply incapable of acting in any form.

Things Havoc disliked: The plot is utterly forgettable in a movie like this, which I don't mind generally, except when it starts to get in the way of the film, which unfortunately, here, it does. It's not that the plot is over-complex, though it verges on it, with multiple betrayals and side-switchings on the part of assorted characters, some of whom don't seem to have anything to do with anything whatsoever (Firefly's Morena Baccarin being the biggest offender here). The primary issue though is that the plot seems to take itself seriously and then not seriously almost at random, going to rather elaborate lengths to arrange McCarthy's entrance into fieldwork only to suddenly and conveniently forget what she's supposed to be doing and what the stated consequences of performing or not performing certain actions were established as being. As before, I don't mind when a movie dispenses with the unimportant crap and gets to the fun part, but you can't do that sort of thing by halves. Either the plot matters or it does not, and discarding the plot once McCarthy suddenly finds her normal voice only serves to generate flashbacks in my mind to McCarthy's bad old habits of playing characters who got away with murder purely because they were loud and obnoxious.

But the worse sin is that of McCarthy's character itself, and this is no fault of McCarthy but of the movie she finds herself in. Her character is quite effectively established as being a retiring, shy sort, and McCarthy can of course play a loud, abrasive asshole with the best of them. What the movie doesn't handle well is the transition between these two things, by which I mean there is no transition whatsoever. McCarthy finds herself in a situation that seems to warrant being a giant dick, and simply becomes one. There's no trace of hesitation or awkwardness to her as she suddenly metamorphs into something previously entirely alien to her entire experience, and even in a broad comedy, that's a lot to swallow. Yes, the movie does pre-establish that there's probably more to her than meets the eye from the get go (a sequence wherein McCarthy has to explain the footage of her beating the crap out of instructors and trainees alike in her training courses from ten years earlier is handled fairly well), and I do indeed tend to prefer it when movies don't belabor points we already know. But something has to be there for the audience to follow the character at all, and the lack thereof not only robs us of the chance for a truly epic moment of cathartic joy, customary when a demure character finally has too much and snaps into a nuclear rage, but also leaves us to wonder (as several of the characters do) just why the hell McCarthy was such milquetoast in the first place if this sort of thing was not only inside her the entire time, but apparently readily accessible for whenever she needed to suddenly tear a pretentious asshole into sobbing ribbons.

Final thoughts:   Like Hercules or Fast & Furious 7 before it, Spy is manifestly not a great movie, but it is a considerably better film than I, and I would guess many others, had previously imagined possible, a movie that finally figures out just how to frame someone like McCarthy in a way that will actually appeal to, instead of repelling, large sections of its audience. A throwaway plot, clunky construction, and suspect characterization of the main character do not do the movie justice, but they equally do not prevent it from actually being funny, something a lot of asshole-comedies, including many of McCarthy's, have had trouble with in the past. I wouldn't say that it somehow flash-converted me into a fan of hers, but all I've ever asked of this project is to be allowed to see movies that I can enjoy the act of watching. And given that Spy offered me that much, if little more, what standing have I to really complain?

Here's to hoping that McCarthy and her directors learn the right lesson from the success of this, reasonably good movie. I meanwhile, have to go and see if someone else has learned the lessons of several other, entirely terrible ones.

Final Score:  6.5/10

Next Time:  Clever girl...

The Gunman

Alternate Title:  The Bourne Encephalopathy

One sentence synopsis:    An ex-PMC contractor for a mining consortium must go on the run when the company decides to clean up loose ends regarding an assassination in Kinshasa.


Things Havoc liked:  Sean Penn is a raving asshole. We all know this. But he's also a multi-academy-award-winning actor and filmmaker, and consequently when a movie of his comes out, it's only polite to pay attention. That holds true even when the movie in question looks like a completely generic MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW movie (once again everyone, that stands for Middle-Aged-Everyman-Who-Is-Secretly-A-Massive-Badass-And-Kills-Everyone-Who-Threatens-His-Women). This isn't exactly the genre that I normally associate with someone like Sean Penn, but then we are talking about the man who made both Shanghai Surprise and I Am Sam, so perhaps I shouldn't be so shocked. But what really attracted me to this film was the supporting cast, a murderer's row of favorite actors of mine including Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, and Ray Winstone. I would watch those three (plus Sean Penn) starring in a laundry commercial, and was reasonably confident I could stomach their take on the Taken/Equalizer/John Wick genre.

And yet, to my surprise, that's not what I was given. The trailers all pointed to another MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW entry (my third in six months), but instead, The Gunman takes its cue not from Taken but from international super-spy thrillers in the vein of movies much better than Taken such as The Bourne Identity or Hannah or the Daniel Craig-helmed 007 movies, movies in which elite special forces-trained agents comprised entirely of vivified asskickium travel the globe to strange and exotic locales to investigate secret goings on, evade the surveillance of hundreds of cameras, drones and satellites controlled by stern-looking headset-wearing men in dark, monitor-filled rooms, and occasionally stop in abandoned factories, old-world apartment buildings, or infrastructure tunnels beneath major landmarks so that they may beat the ever-loving piss out of one another using some cinematic combination of krav maga and ninjitsu. Of course at 54, Penn is older than the actors one typically sees in these sorts of movies, but has been aggressively working out to prepare for it, and plainly wants you to know about it. The upshot is that despite being atypical for the role in question, this is Sean Penn, and he does a fine job by twisting the role away from a fresh super-spy and into a retired one. Indeed, far from shying away from Penn's age, the filmmakers make it a central point of the movie, having him diagnosed with various sorts of chronic concussion-related syndromes that should be familiar to anyone who follows the NFL, the consequences of a life spent doing the sorts of things that heroes in these kinds of movies customarily do.

Pierre Morel, director of the original Taken and District 13, takes the helm here as director, and his intention is plainly to split the difference between Taken's MAEWISAMBAKEWTHW-ness and District 13's frenetic parkour-laden action. The result feels like an "adult" version of Taken's middle age power fantasies, with a nice helping of John leCarre-style real-world grit mixed in, thanks to a plot that centers around an assassination attempt on a member of the Congolese government at the behest of a PMC working for international mining cartels. Ray Winstone plays the same character Ray Winstone always plays (I say this with the utmost respect), a gravel-voiced looming indeterminate badass who does whatever he wishes despite the hero's (or villain's) opinions on the subject. Javier Bardem meanwhile, who has far more of a range, plays against the trailers by portraying a drunken asshole in the vein of his from Skyfall Bond Villain, a morose, bitter jackass who resents Penn for the mess they were all involved in in Central Africa and who is cognizant, moreso than most of the price to be paid. Great actors cover a great deal, as always, and it's a reasonable amount of fun just watching these guys gyrate around one another in a typical modern spy plot.

Things Havoc disliked:  Unfortunately, that's about all there is to be had in this movie, as beyond the idea of making a movie with Penn as Jason Bourne, the filmmakers did not seem to have any idea what they wanted to actually do here.

The Gunman is an extremely generic film. Not the one that was advertised in the trailer, mind you, but generic nonetheless, one that has little to say and no real idea of what they should actually do with what little they have. Only this level of bafflement could possibly explain why they would go through the trouble to hire Idris Elba, a bad man if ever there was one (I say this also with the utmost respect), feature him prominently in the promotional materials and the trailer, and then use him in a two-minute cameo role that effectively amounts to one scene in which a mysterious, unknown man sits down on a public bench next to our hero and tells him personal details about his own life as a way to hint that he may wish to take a certain course of action. How people keep misusing Idris Elba I will never understand, but if you are a fan, as I am, be forewarned that he is more or less not in this movie at all.

Nor is there anything to replace him with. Shakespearian veteran and reliable sleazeball (once more with utmost respect) Mark Rylance portrays the villain, such as it is, but the script is so poor of imagination that he cannot think of any plot to engage in other than the tired kidnap-the-woman-the-hero-loves routine, following which he meets with the hero in a cinematic location and dutifully sends his henchmen to kill him one by one in reverse order of previous screentime. His lengthy monologues on the rudiments of power and cynicism, however well delivered, are absolutely interminable, until we begin to wonder if he intends to bore the hero to death, as he is doing to us. The entire concussion angle, supposedly the very thing that separates the movie from its peers, is used for nothing but convenient weaknesses to apply to the hero at strategic moments, as Penn makes no visible effort to avoid getting hit in the head or blown through windows by concussion grenades, nor suffers any consequences from doing so save when the plot requires it. Meanwhile, the love interest, played by way-too-young-for-Sean-Penn Jasmine Trinca, has no purpose save the one I just mentioned. There is not even a tendentious effort to tie her into the plot, or to allow her to do anything but serve as a convenient hostage or prop during the obligatory action sequences. The entire process feels like a paint-by-numbers exercise, as if all of the actors involved just wanted an excuse to take a holiday in Spain for a while.

Final thoughts:   The Gunman is one of the most routine films I've ever seen, a movie that exists because it must, competently performing the required steps that movies like this involve before the lights come up and we can all go home. As an excuse to watch actors I like doing their thing alongside pretty cinematography and decent action, I suppose there are worse examples. But given Sean Penn, an actor whose obsession with good works and left-wing politics borders on the maniacal, I confess to complete confusion as to why it was made. This is the sort of movie that Liam Neeson has made a habit of making in recent years, a movie designed to showcase his ability to beat up and/or kill people as well as seduce women considerably younger than himself. Sean Penn's ego is planet-sized, but I cannot envision the same person who made Dead Man Walking and Mystic River feeling the need to show off like this. Perhaps I've managed to underestimate the man's ego, or perhaps he (and his co-stars) all needed paychecks, but the resulting film is almost aggressively ordinary, and contains nothing, however well done, that any moderate film fan hasn't seen a hundred times before.

Go see the Gunman if you're a hardcore Sean Penn addict, or if you absolutely have to see something this time of year (as I did). But if you're one of the many people free from either of these torments, then my suggestion would be to keep counting down the days before you can watch Avengers 2.

Final Score:  5.5/10

Next Time:  A decent into raving madness.  And a whole lot of vodka.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Alternate Title:  Mr. Darcy Kills Everyone

One sentence synopsis:    A poor kid from a council estate is recruited into an international organization of gentlemen-spies to stop a megalomaniac from destroying the world.


Things Havoc liked:  Pickings tend to be slim this time of year. We all know this. We've been through this dance now four times, and entering a fifth, we have all seen what disasters can lie in wait in Doldrums season. Last week alone we encountered the second movie of the year, a shoe-in for the worst of the year list already in the form of a Mila Kunis snore-fest masquerading as a space opera. I do not, as a rule, see movies that I expect to suck, but with the inflexible requirement of a film a week bearing down upon one, it can be necessary at times like these to take risks one might not otherwise take, see movies that smell bad because of a stupid-looking trailer or a formulaic plot. Sometimes, in the darkest periods of the movie calendar, it becomes necessary to take what few glimmers of hope are on offer, the pedigree of a director with a fine record behind him for instance, one like Matthew Vaughn, of Stardust, Kick Ass, and X-Men: First Class, or perhaps the opportunity to see actors one adores, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Michael Caine, Samuel L. Jackson, regardless of the evident idiocy of the project they are appearing in. Sometimes, in a time like this, on the heels of a terrible movie and a disappointing Oscar season, one must take a risk that the film one is going to see may well be garbage, but hold onto the hope that it may, at least, have some entertainment value as garbage.

And when one takes this risk, though I do not recommend trusting to it, one should also bear in mind that there is always, no matter how unlikely, the possibility that the film you have selected under such protest may actually turn out to be something amazing.

Kingsman: The Secret Service, is a living argument against cynicism. It is a stunning, explosive, horrifyingly-violent action-comedy madhouse, filmed with wit and charm and the same grotesque lack of restraint that Vaughn has become a byword for, a movie I had absolutely no expectations for, which left me literally gushing in its aftermath. Maybe Doldrums season broke me, and maybe it's just that I haven't seen a movie this unabashedly fun in more than six months (that's twenty-five goddamn movies, bear in mind), but if this is the sort of thing about which I am wrong, I do not care to be right! Kingsman is a revelation and a masterpiece. I adored it. What the hell else do you want?

I love Colin Firth, though he is not someone I think of when it comes time to cast irreverent action comedies, or at least he wasn't prior to this film. Playing Harry Hart, codename Galahad, a middle-aged James Bond analogue in a five-thousand-pound suit with a cut-glass posh accent and impeccable manners, Firth brings all his Kings Speech/British Reserved charm to a role that involves him, at certain points, performing some of the most showy and violent action sequences I have seen since The Raid 2. If this sounds like something you cannot envision, then you are on the same page I was on not long ago, as I presumed, erroneously, that any action scene involving Colin Firth would have to be some sort of Taken-2-style bad-stunt-double-editing work. And maybe it was here too, I don't know, but the illusion at the very least is perfectly compelling. Firth is on fire in this movie, making his turn in last year's wretched Railway Man feel like a distant memory receding blissfully into the past. The insanities he gets up to over the course of this film would not be out of place in any one of Matthew Vaughn's previous works, all without once letting his veneer of old-world charm drop. It's one of those roles that causes you to never look at an actor the same way again.

Not so Samuel L. Jackson, who has made a career out of roles that fit that very description. Here he plays Valentine, a cross between Steve Jobs and Mike Tyson, a billionaire environmental philanthropist who intends to destroy the world as a solution to global warming. Jackson always livens up the screen no matter what he's playing, but here he plays a lisping martinet seeking world domination and mass death in the best tradition of a Bond villain, a comparison made explicitly several times over the course of the movie. Jackson's character is absurd, but it's consistent across the film, which is a rarity in cases like this, as many actors think that their villains have to continually dial up the crazy to absurd levels to make these kinds of things work. Jackson, a veteran of hundreds of movies good and less good, knows better. Another man who knows better is the incomparable Mark Strong, whom I love dearly, and who takes on a role as "Merlin" that is one part Q, one part drill instructor, and another part crusty-old-badass-who-knows-it-all. If the notion of spending several hours in the company of Mark Strong doing these things does not appeal to you, then get the hell out of my reviews, you tasteless snob.

But while Firth and Jackson and Strong are always awesome, movies like this always fall apart because of their leads, the inevitable unknown young actor who has to play the central role in the coming of age stories that these sorts of things always take the form of. And yet for once, that isn't what happened, because this time, Vaughn somehow found newcomers Taron Egerton and Sophie Cookson, who are given the task of playing Eggsy and Roxy, two newly minted recruits for the shadowy secret service, whose task it is to try and prove themselves against their peers and the usual rote steps movies like this take on. And yet both Egerton and Cookson, particularly the former, are spot perfect in the role. Egerton manages to do the near-impossible by playing a likeable chav (think about that), successfully walking the tightrope between a wide-eyed youngster overawed at his present circumstances (which is usually boring), and a smart-mouthed wise-ass who claims to have seen it all (which is always insufferable). Egerton nails everything he's given, both before, during, and after his transformation into a Kingsman, be it action scenes, drama, humor, or simple quiet dialogue. I have literally never seen anyone pull off a role like this, save perhaps for Chris Pine's turn as Kirk in the new Trek movies, and given that that performance anchored the entire film, it's only fitting that this one does the same.

Kingsman, like Kick-Ass, is based on a comic book by legendary asshole Mark Millar, and yet while I have few good things to say about the man, his insistence on working with Matthew Vaughn ever since the debacle that was Wanted is certainly one of them. Vaughn is in his element here, producing a movie that is grotesquely over-the-top without ever losing a sense of fun, an expertly shot and crafted film that relies on the contrast between good old-fashioned ludicrous ultra-violence and British reserved humor to stage its strongest moments. Stuntwork is flashy and inventive, including multiple sequences of all-out crowd-brawls, and battles involving a female assassin (Algerian Hip-hop dancer Sofia Boutella) named Gazelle who fights with a pair of "blade runner"-style prosthetic legs whose name is taken literally. A thunderous soundtrack featuring everything from Lynard Skynyrd to Edward Elgar, and a colorful visual style that richly paints the scenes of bloody slaughter and allows the audience to drink up every last detail polishes everything off alongside a whole series of hilarious stunt castings and cameos (try and ID the scientist in the opening scene. It took me five minutes to be certain I wasn't hallucinating).

Things Havoc disliked:  All of this is necessary, of course, to cover up the fact that the plot of Kingsman is as generic as it comes, a plot that is no doubt engraved somewhere on a plaque in the old-screenwriter's-home in Beverly Hills. A young kid who has fallen in with the wrong crowd and failed to live up to his potential because of challenging life circumstances must finally "make something" of himself, growing up and becoming a man. I have only seen this particular plot done about six hundred times before, in everything from the aforementioned Star Trek to Millar's own Kick Ass and Wanted. So repetetive is this plot, to be honest, that I could predict, beat for beat, what was to happen in largely every single act of the film, who was to die, at whose hand, and what the results of that death were, who would win what competitions, what characters would turn out to be truly heroic deep down, and which ones would fall by the wayside. Vaughn and the scriptwriters use every trick there is to try and disguise the fact that this plot is entirely derivative of roughly a third of all movies ever made, but there is simply nothing for it. We have all seen this story before. Many, many times.

Final thoughts:   But then again, doesn't that fact make Kingsman all the more impressive? After all, if I wanted to go see original works, I would watch nothing but the most obscure, foreign, indie cinema and leave Hollywood and its directors to rot. That would, however, mean I would not get to have seen Kingsman, the finest pure action movie I have seen in a good long while, and one of the biggest surprises I have ever encountered at the cinema. So well-crafted, so vibrant, so much fun is this movie that the presence of what may quite literally be the oldest story on earth does not detract from it a whit. I adored this film, to the point where I was babbling incoherently about it for hours thereafter, and even saw it a second time just so that a friend of mine would get a chance to bear witness to its awesomeness.

I do what I do because I love watching good movies, but a good movie that comes about where I had not thought to find one is perhaps the best surprise of all. So it was with Cloud Atlas, with Suckerpunch, with Real Steel and Cabin in the Woods and Pain & Gain. I understand if one might be inclined to dismiss Kingsman as a cheap ripoff of Bond or any one of a dozen YA books as that's precisely what I did before I went to see it, but the reality is simply, gloriously, else. Kingsman flat out rocks. Go forth and bear witness. If you've any appreciation for the sheer joy of cinema, you will not regret a minute of it.

Final Score:  8/10

Next Time:  Vampires!

A Most Wanted Man

Alternate Title:  Diablo Ex Machina

One sentence synopsis:    The head of a secret German counter-terrorism team tries to entrap a terrorist financier by manipulating a Chechen refugee and his lawyer.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. There was little option but to employ them given the issues that arose. You have been warned.

Things Havoc liked:  Phillip Seymour Hoffman's passing earlier this year caught him in the midst of his customary massive workload, allowing us the next year or so to watch him in the various films that were still under production when he died. I've contrived to miss a number of these, boring indie fare as they seemed to be, but this one I was interested in, as John le Carré spy thrillers have a decent pedigree on film, and the subject of this one looked particularly interesting. Hoffman plays Günther Bachmann, a dumpy, middle-aged spy, as are basically all of le Carré's protagonists, head of a secret group of clandestine bagmen tasked with penetrating networks of terrorist cells both domestically in Hamburg and elsewhere. As anyone who has ever seen a John le Carré film or read a book of his can tell you, Hoffman was made to play a leading role in one of his books. Wandering about in a perpetual half-stooped slouch, Hoffman looks like nothing but another governmental middle manager of the type that seems to grace all the bureaucracies of Europe (and elsewhere). His character almost never raises his voice, doesn't scream or chase people, not even in the midst of enhanced interrogations, and looks ill-at-ease when called upon to report to formal superiors. His techniques rely on patience and surveillance, turning one asset after another to exert pressure against the next one. The skill with which he manipulates people caught in compromising circumstances is impressive, and by the end of the film, when four people are in a room discussing crime, three of whom are actually working for Hoffman, it all seems perfectly natural.

But Hoffman's merely one of many in this cast. Rachel McAdams, an actress I have successfully avoided up until now, actually does a fine turn as Annabelle Richter, a young immigration lawyer who allows ignorance and idealism to drag her way too far into a case she does not understand the particulars of. Watching her squirm as Hoffman plays her like a violin is exquisite, but not as exquisite as Willem Defoe, one of the weirdest men in Hollywood, here playing perhaps the most normal character he has ever touched, a bank manager whose father was involved in unscrupulous business, and who must do what he can to cover himself and his institution against liability and governmental interference. Iranian veteran actor Homayoun Ershadi, of Zero Dark Thirty and Agora, plays Dr. Faisal Abdullah, a seemingly-pro-Western Arab of means and influence whose secret funneling of money towards terrorist cells touches all of this off, his character only ever betraying bare hints of what he must actually be plotting. But the best of the bunch is unquestionably unknown Russian actor Grigoriy Dobrygin, whose character Issa is a scarred, skittish, half-Chechen trauma victim, who seems to be up to no good when we first see him, and only slowly do we realize is nothing but a scarred, broken refugee, scared and confused by his surroundings. The film plays a brilliant game with this character, using shot construction and expression to give us Westerners the unmistakable impression that we are looking at a Terrorist, only to pull the rug out from under us when he proves interested in nothing of the sort.

If I sound like I'm just reciting actors and their roles though, bear in mind that this film basically IS the actors and their roles, and the situations that such characters are inevitably going to be placed in by virtue of being around one another. We watch as Hoffman watches, as the characters are slowly ensnared in his web, turning them one by one into "assets" to be employed in the furtherance of his cause. And what is that cause? Not the destruction of his enemies nor the death of the aforementioned people, but information. We see Hoffman and his coterie use the Lawyer to get to the Banker, the Banker to get to the Doctor, and the Doctor to go on and get to others, penetrating further and further along until he can reach the actual source of the evil he seeks to fight. Along the way, as best he can, Hoffman does try to do his best for his assets, if nothing else because a carrot and a stick have more persuasive power than the stick alone. The Lawyer wants her client given refugee status. The Banker wants to have his past unexamined by society at large, and as these are things that are secondary to Hoffman's goal, he can get them in furtherance of it. Le Carré's stories are usually like this, procedural spy thrillers that eschew the Bond-esque escapades for realistic investigations on just how intelligence work is properly done.

Things Havoc disliked:  The problem though, is that this is not the only thing that le Carré's stories are usually like. And here's where we unavoidably get to the spoilers, because one of le Carré's other conceits, from as far back as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, is that everything to do with the United States is evil.

I mentioned spoilers above. I'm serious.

No, I'm not trying to turn this into another nationalist screed. I'm well aware of US intelligence's less-than-spotless record when it comes to the work we have done, both in the Cold War and the War on Terror. But there's a difference between wishing to point out the CIA's failings, and being obsessed by them. Zero Dark Thirty did the former, showing enhanced interrogations, unapologetically, and showing that they were useless wastes of time and effort to torture undeserving people for no gain. But this film has nothing whatsoever to do with the CIA, save only for the character of Martha Sullivan, the German Station Chief for the CIA played by Robin Wright. Initially this character is somewhat mysterious, as she appears only once in a while, and there mostly to bring up backstory about the main character and bounce ideas off of him, as well as provide the audience with some sense of the ticking clock going on back in Berlin. Fair enough. But in the last ten minutes of the film, this character suddenly morphs into Snidely Whiplash, who swoops in to wreck the operation, beat up everyone with goons, kidnap and destroy people's lives, and all for no conceivable gain whatsoever.

It would be one thing if this trainwreck were the product of ignorance, mistakes, or other elements established somewhere in the film, but it's not. It's instead the inverted equivalent of a Deus Ex Machina, wherein an outside element not previously established suddenly shows up in the middle of nowhere to ruin everything, irrespective of what any of the characters have and have not done up until this point. And why is this somehow an acceptable thing to throw into a movie that had been so scrupulously realistic until this point? Because the element in question is the CIA, and the CIA is axiomatically evil. They need no establishment, no motivation, no background, no characterization, nothing. To le Carré and his filmmakers they may as well be the Nazis, a plot device assumed by all to be evil without need for any such detail-work. A film interested in showing off the ways in which the CIA interferes with domestic intelligence would be one thing, as would one where the interplay between Hoffman and Wright led them to this state. This film however, is so intent on ensuring that the CIA gets mud thrown in their eye, that ultimately, the film would rather do that than actually tell its story, and literally breaks the entire narrative just so that they can make a cheap, smug point about how dumb, stupid, and recklessly evil the Americans are. So evil, in fact, that there's no need to even establish them as so. Their nationality does that well enough. The movie goes on as normal until an evil American who has nothing to do with anything suddenly destroys everything, and then it is over. Curtain up. Credits roll.

Final thoughts:    I don't hate this film. Indeed I quite liked this film up until the very end. What I hate is the underlying assumption behind it, that the need for ideological pie-throwing in the direction of the CIA is sufficient, by itself, to absolve the film from actually telling its story. It's as though le Carré, or Dutch director Anton Corbijn (whose last film, "The American", also suffered from this defect), feel that all they need do is stand on stage and say "Americans, AMIRITE?!" in order to get independent or European film critics to praise his daring exposure of the corruption that lies in the heart of those barbaric cretins from across the ocean. That said, as I once mentioned to a friend of mine whose hatred for a failed ending on an excellent video game was getting the best of him, a film that does everything right except for five minutes of its runtime is still a good film, even if it picks the worst possible five minutes to screw everything up in.

A few years back, I reviewed le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a film that I thought was highly confusing and erratic, albeit good despite. This film is considerably clearer than that one was, but all that managed to reveal is that sometimes an author's proclivities are best left opaque.

Final Score:  6/10