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The King’s Man (2021)
In 2015, I was completely on board with a Kingsman franchise. Based upon the Mark Millar comics, the film was a hip, transgressive, action-packed, and refreshingly modern remix of stale spy thriller tropes. It also followed a satisfying snobs vs. slobs class conflict and a My Fair Lady-stye personal transformation of street kid to suave secret agent. In short, I loved it, and I said co-writer/director Matthew Vaughn used big studio budgets smarter than any other blockbuster filmmaker. Flash forward to 2017, and the Kingsman sequel started to show cracks in my resolute faith in Vaughn, and now with the long-delayed Kingsman prequel, I just don’t know if I care any more about this universe. It feels like the appeal of the franchise has been stamped out by its inferior additions. This one chronicles the origins of the Kingsman tailors/secret agency, a question nobody was really asking. It’s the beginnings of World War I, and a comical cadre of super villains, such as Mata Hari, Rasputin, and future assassin Gavrilo Princip, is meeting to plot doom and destruction and goad the world’s powers into war (in a goofy but appreciated comical touch, Tom Hollander plays the leaders of England, Germany, and Russia). Ralph Fiennes plays Orlando Oxford, a pacifist leading a special team trying to thwart the drumbeats of war by taking out the shadow brokers. The Kingsman movies were known for its attitude and cheekily crossing the line from time to time, but that willful perversity seems so desperate with this new movie. During the Rasputin mission, the disheveled madman literally stuffs an entire pie into his face, tongues Oxford’s wound on his upper thigh, and lasciviously promises more to come for him and Oxford’s adult son. The sequence is almost astonishing in poor taste and grotesque, and it just seems to go on forever. And yet, thanks to the sheer audacious energy of Rhys Ifans as the pansexual cleric, this actually might be the best or at least most entertaining part of the 130-minute movie. The problem is that The King’s Man doesn’t know whether it wants to commit to being a ribald loose retelling of history or a serious war drama. It’s hard to square Rasputin cracking wise and sword fighting to the 1812 Overture and an interminable 20-minute tonal detour that seriously examines the horrors of trench warfare. It jumps from silly comic book violence to grisly reality. That entire episode is then washed away with a joyless climax that feels like a deflated video game compound assault. I’ll credit Vaughn for dashes of style, like sword-fighting from the P.O.V. of the swords, but this movie feels too all over the place in tone, in ideas, in execution and lacking a dynamic anchor. Fiennes is a dry and dashing leading man, though I was having flashbacks of his 1998 Avengers misfire at points. It’s a story that doesn’t really accentuate the knowledge base of future Kingsman, and it’s lacking a sustained sense of fun and invention. It needed more banter, more subversion, more over-the-top and less formulaic plot turns. In my review of The Golden Circle, I concluded with, “It would be a shame for something like this to become just another underwhelming franchise.” That day has sadly arrived, ladies and gentlemen.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Self/less (2015)
The most surprising thing about Self/less occurred approximately 115 minutes into the film itself, when it revealed that Tarsem Singh was the director. Tarsem is known for lavish visual cinematic canvases such as The Cell and Immortals, and to realize that this is the same man responsible for an otherwise disappointing and visually mundane sci-fi thriller, well it was a shock. Why hire a visual stylist and then restrict him to such a limited palate? Self/less is an intriguing premise (borrowed a tad from Seconds) and it keeps all the interesting ethical and psychological questions at bay to follow a generic thriller formula. There’s not one real surprise in this film; even the reveals and surprises will be easily telegraphed. Ben Kingsley plays Damian, a dying rich man who undergoes a risky experiment to live longer, having his consciousness transferred into a younger human host played by Ryan Reynolds. It’s another chance to be young, party, enjoy sexual relations with women who are more likely to go home with somebody who looks like Reynolds. There’s a catch: if he stops taking his special red pills, the host’s brain will take over control. That’s because, surprise, the bodies aren’t grown in labs but are human volunteers. Here could be some topical class exploitation and social commentary, but Self/less ignores the more intriguing direction at every point to play it safe. Damian finds his host’s family and from that point on it’s a series of chases with bad guys. One of those chases is actually fairly entertaining, utilizing a conjoined automobile in a clever and devastating way. It never feels like Reynolds and Kingsley are playing the same character. Reynolds’ charm is subsumed by this role and he feels adrift. I’ll admit that this movie is efficient and each scene pushes the story forward; it’s just the direction of that story I’d like to alter. Alas, Self/less is a competent but fairly underwhelming thriller that squanders its premise.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Leap Year (2010)
It’s not funny. It has more clichés than imaginable. The very premise that a woman has to travel all the way to Ireland to be “allowed” to propose to her long-time boyfriend is bizarre and borderline offensive. And yet, the unmistakably lowball chick flick is watchable thanks to the charms of leads Amy Adams and Matthew Goode. The two actors pretend like they’re in a different, better movie, and the illusion lasts just long enough for the film to come to its typical happy ending before you sit back and say, “Hey, that was pure junk.” Ireland is treated yet again as this quaint place of hospitality and magic, like it’s some postcard wonderland. Granted, the scenery is beautiful, and director Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, Shopgirl) is quite taken with his shooting locations, highlighting the natural beauty of the Emerald Isles. With all the attention on the scenery, and not so much the plot, you realize that everyone signed up for this movie as a means of having a paid vacation. And I can’t blame them or hate their movie, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it either.
Nate’s Grade: C
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A Single Man (2009)
Tom Ford is a rare human being. He seems to be good at everything. The prominent fashion designer has never been averse to risk. He left work in America to toil for Gucci, a faltering European luxury brand. He became the creative director from 1994-2004, eventually leaving to form his own company. And after decades of success in the world of fashion, Ford decided to make the jump into movies. From fashion mogul to film director, nobody else has done it, let alone done it with such acclaim right out of the gate. A Single Man has been met with rich praise and Ford has been touted as a natural filmmaker. Perhaps Ford’s odyssey into moving pictures will inspire others to drop their needle and thread and pick up a camera instead. Who wants to see a Project Runway/Project Greenlight crossover?
In the early 1960s, George Falconer (Colin Firth) is a 50-year-old English professor still recovering from the loss of his love. Jim (Matthew Goode) and George had been together for over 16 years, that is, until Jim died in a car accident one rainy night. George has never fully recovered since that awful night. He doesn’t intend to waste any more time waiting for a reunion; at the end of the day, he will kill himself. He lays out his suit, empties his safety deposit box, and writes letters to his remaining friends and family. This will be George Falconer’s last day in Los Angeles, but perhaps in the meantime he’ll discover more reasons to give life another chance.
Ford comes from the world of high fashion and here he proves that he should be taken seriously as a filmmaker. He has a sumptuous eye for visuals. A Single Man looks great in every scene. The costumes and period details are impeccable and may even give the historical consultants from Mad Men some due pause. The cinematography by Eduard Grau can become irritating because the colors go from drab to vibrant, reflecting the main character’s changing moods (lifted spirits = brighter colors!). At first it’s a neat visual gimmick but as it persists it becomes a crude blinking light, inelegantly summing up what the movie feels it cannot communicate. At times it just feels like piling on. I don’t need the color to drain from the screen to understand that George is sad.
Ford’s adaptation skills, on the other hand, could use some more polish. He and David Scearce spent years adapting the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood. They even added the whole suicide angle, which becomes their narrative crutch. There is a refreshingly funny sequence where George tries to act out his suicide position and goes from the shower to his bed, finally deciding upon shooting himself inside a zipped sleeping bag to cover the ensuing mess. This little five-minute stretch is like an oasis of humor in the super serious desert that is the rest of the film. The second half of the film is dominated by a will-he-or-won’t-he flirtation with a good-looking lithe college student (Nicholas Hoult, the boy all grown up from About a Boy). The kid shows definite interest. The romantic angle syncs up with George’s lost love and proves to be a welcomed distraction to George’s dejection. However, their connection is extremely thin, with Hoult making flirty eyes and inquisitively tilting his head for an hour. The romantic story exists as a means of making sure the narrative can mend George’s broken heart.
The story meanders for too long with a few revealing flashbacks, but honestly how hard is it to wring pathos from a suicidal man? How hard is it to write a middle-aged man taking stock of his life, getting his affairs in order, and saying his fuzzy goodbyes to people who don?t realize the significance. Everything gains magnitude under that prism; every pause, every inhalation, every wistful glance becomes riddled with deeper subtextual meaning, or so we are lead to believe. Every moment can unlock a new memory or secret, like when he sniffs a stranger’s dog and recalls his former beloved pet he shared with Jim. Under this guide, it is hard to tell whether the movie is doing any actual dramatic lifting. So much is supposed to be interpreted in the blankness, which the audience is entrusted to craft meaning to the character’s nostalgic pit stops. “Oh, he must be taking in the scent of the ocean one last time,” or, “Oh, he must be thinking about… something. But he’s gotta definitely be thinking about something. Something deep.” Can you see how this might get tedious after a while?
A Single Man could have afforded more peaks into George’s background and less of Julianne Moore. She plays an old boozy Brit friend of his from back in the day. Her moments onscreen, while limited, are a chore to get through because Moore just consumes her characters sadness. She gets drunk on the one emotion she’s been hired to play. She’s certainly not embarrassing herself like in 2006’s Freedomland, but this isn’t a performance for her illustrious highlight reel. I don’t care if she does get nominated for a supporting actress Oscar, as seems all but certain; I expect more from Moore.
Firth is the whole movie so it’s a relief that he turns in the performance of his career. He gives a complex portrayal that doesn’t nicely fit into the typical Firth cinematic creature: priggish, clever, dry, ultimately a good guy. Here you can practically see the gears in his head processing the last moments of life. The extent he can convey with his eyes or simply the corners of his mouth are exquisite. He provides so much of what the narrative does not. He’s a sad creature mired in one long day of existential grief, but I need more from this character than what Ford affords.
George Falconer gives a dandy speech about the fear of the minority, almost outing himself to his college class, but for a flick about an older gay male passing through life to be an invisible member of society, Ford adopts a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to narrative. He buttons up his characters emotions. Understatement is lovely when there’s enough to work with. That’s the issue with A Single Man. Ford hasn’t given himself enough to work with, instead forcing the audience to make up the work by inserting meaning into every furtive brow and pained expression. This is a meditation on a life in passing, told through a series of small vignettes. I need more than a melancholy man listening to the clock strike seconds off his soon-to-be-ended life. If I wanted to watch that movie I’d check out the latest Gus van Sant art house masturbations.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Watchmen (2009)
In the realm of comics, Watchmen is tantamount to the Bible. It consisted of 12 issues released between 1986-1987 but it arguable changed the medium forever afterward. TIME magazine listed the book, by author Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, as one of the 100 greatest 20th century novels. Therefore, there has always been heavy trepidation within the geek community when Hollywood came courting the Watchmen property. Different directors have tried tackling the material, going back to the late 1980s when Terry Gilliam was hired to direct and producer Joel Silver was adamant about getting Arnold Schwarzenegger to portray Dr. Manhattan (back then, they totally just would have painted him blue — like they did when he was Mr. Freeze). The movie would seem like a tantalizing possibility and then the production would collapse, most recently in 2004 with director Paul Greengrass attached. Director Zack Snyder (300) understood all of the concerns from the notoriously vocal geek community and attempted to make the most faithful Watchmen film possible. He accomplished that goal. But was it the right goal?
In this alternative account of history, masked crime fighters exist and were even bankrolled by the U.S. government. President Nixon is re-elected to a third term, thanks in part to superheroes winning the Vietnam War, and then he outlaws all masked vigilantes. Flash forward to 1985, and Nixon is on his fifth term and staring down Soviet aggression into Afghanistan. It appears that the world on is on the brink of nuclear annihilation by the dueling super powers engaged in a staring contest. Edward Blake, a.k.a. the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is thrown from his apartment window and killed. Blake used to belong to a second-generation superhero team in the 1970s called the Watchmen. The other members consisted of Dan Dreiberg, a.k.a. Night Owl (Patrick Wilson), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), a.k.a. Ozymandias, the glowing blue man Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who was transformed into a god-like figure of power after a laboratory accident, and then there’s Laurie Jupiter, a.k.a. The Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), who was following in her mother’s (Carla Gugino) footsteps, the first Silk Spectre. The death of the Comedian brings the old team back together and rekindles some interest in putting on the super suits and fighting crime one more time. It seems someone out there is trying to knock off the retired superheroes, and Rorschach is convinced that a bigger conspiracy is unwinding.
It’s difficult for me to formally express my feelings and reactions to the Watchmen film adaptation. Count me among the throng of fans that feels that Moore’s source material is a remarkably dense and witty deconstruction of the superhero mythos. Imagine a Superman that can’t be bothered to help out humanity because he feels life is overrated, or a group of super heroes that don’t necessarily do anything heroic; when they beat up the bad guys it’s because they get a sexual thrill from the rush of violence. My voice was among the cacophonous crowd screaming, “Don’t you dare butcher this great work! Keep it as close to the comic as possible!” And that’s pretty much what Snyder delivers. But now I’m left to wonder if a literal-minded interpretation is truly what I wanted all along. Watchmen is not like Sin City, a comic that was already a movie in panels. Frank Miller’s ode to film noir was ready and waiting to be a splashy action movie with style to spare. Watchmen is not a ready-made action vehicle, as it really only has about two extended pieces of action. Moore’s story examined what kind of people would become vigilante crime fighters if the government approved the practice. Surprise, it’s a bunch of sociopaths that are now getting checks from Uncle Sam! Watchmen is a nihilistic account of human behavior and far more cerebral than any superhero film that has ever graced the screen. Seriously, what other superhero movie opens with a fictitious episode of PBS’ political yak fest, The McLaughlin Group? So I suppose this paragraph is a sheepish way of admitting that perhaps Watchmen should have stayed place on the page unless, gulp, it was advantageously adapted for the medium of film.
It’s not that Snyder does a bad job or that the film itself is poor. While Snyder isn’t the best man to handle actors, he is certainly a skilled visual tactician and knows how to make some immensely pleasing imagery. He breathes great life into the images of the comic book and filled in the blanks nicely, and his one big artistic addition is one of the film’s best moments. In the opening credits we get a series of shots that perfectly establish this alternative universe, where JFK shakes Dr. Manhattan’s hand on the White House lawn only to be later gunned down by none other than the Comedian in Dallas. The segment is cleverly set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin'” and is a terrific intro into a re-imagined America. I wanted to spend more time exploring the differences, like watching a giant Dr. Manhattan win the Vietnam War in one week’s time. In many ways, Watchmen is Snyder’s epic pop commentary on the history of the United States. Dr. Manhattan takes the first pictures of the astronauts on the moon. It is a female crime fighter that swoops a woman off her feet for that iconic celebratory kiss marking the end of World War II. The flick even has a period appropriate, synth-aided score, which is fine, though the use of period pop songs can be distracting. Watching Laurie and Dan make love to the raspy tunes of Leonard Cohen’s already overused tune “Hallelujah” is a deeply uncomfortable moment. Also, the aging makeup is horrendously bad. Gugino looks like she has a turkey waddle and the older Nixon looks like a freaking Halloween mask.
At what cost did Watchmen make it to the screen? Wacthmen plays as an adaptation like the first two Harry Potter movies, like there was an assigned checklist rather than a fully developed script. I achieved a brief understanding with the characters and each central figure provides a glimpse of the trouble beneath the surface. Laurie is a girl with daddy issues who’s been pressured to follow her mother, a rape victim who still loves her rapist. Dan is a self-pitying putz who has never felt more alive than when he puts on a costume. Rorschach has the same pessimistic view of mankind that Travis Bickle did, viewing many people as vermin clogging the gutter. Yet Rorschach also is the most single-minded of all the characters and abides by an innate moral code and sense of duty, never mind the fact that he may have lost his mind. Dr. Manhattan has been turned into a supreme being and has lost his connection to humanity. The Comedian is a man of wanton desire who declares himself to be the epitome of the American dream: giving in completely to the id. Watchmen has been deemed as an unfilmable book, and perhaps they were right. It feels like Watchmen and looks like Watchmen, but the movie never seems to become anything grander than the sum of its parts. The Dr. Manhattan back-story, where we see him live life in the past, present, and future simultaneously may be one of the best moments in the movie, but it doesn’t add up to much more than an interesting aside. The trips to Mars and Antarctica provide nice visual landscapes but do little else. The other quandary is that everything Snyder cut from the comic (the side characters, the pirate comic, the alien squid) is something that ultimately was unimportant. All of the important and memorable moments from the comic are here, though abbreviated and truncated. Even a 2-hour and 40-minute movie feels like too much of a sprint through such rich material probably better suited to the more accommodating narrative confines of a glossy HBO miniseries. The movie ends up becoming a handsomely mounted and reverent homage to the source material, but I question if the movie serves any other purpose than as an advertisement to go read the book. Will people unfamiliar with the book enjoy a movie practically tailor-made to appeal to fans of the book? Who will watch the Watchmen?
Make no mistake, Watchmen is a hard R-rated movie and if any parent takes their child to this flick because it has men in capes, then that parent should have their child removed. Snyder has ramped up the book’s adult elements, which were originally a commentary on how comics flirt with sex and violence but never get their hands too dirty. Snyder has gotten his hands dirty all right. Instead of zapping others into poofs of smoke, Dr. Manhattan turns them into explosions of human goo that stick to the ceiling. Instead of the Comedian being thrown from the window, we see an extended fight sequence that seems to indicate that the Comedian’s apartment is full of nothing but breakable glass tables. When Dan and Laurie get into a street brawl where bones pop through skin. The sex scenes now involve an almost-agonizing level of thrusting. This is an adult tale in a very simple sense: there are boobs and blood. But the movie is also adult in the fact that it trades in complex political, psychological, and philosophic ideologies, asking hard questions that do not come with easy answers. Do the ends ever justify the means or is mankind destined to always destroy itself? Is humanity worth saving and at what cost? This is probably the most subversive studio-backed movie to come out of Hollywood since 1997’s pro-fascism melodrama, Starship Troopers.
The three best performances in the movie all come from the three weirdest and most messed up characters. Haley (Little Children) fully inhabits the grisly character of Rorschach and growls his way through the movie. You can tell just by the man’s face how much he has weathered. Crudup (Big Fish) and his gentle voice make Dr. Manhattan an intriguing yet beleaguered super being. Morgan (TV’s Grey’s Anatomy) makes the Comedian one consummate bastard but a bastard that you cannot stop watching, nonetheless. The rest of the cast does suitable jobs and I don’t feel that Goode (The Lookout) or Akerman (27 Dresses) deserve the drubbings they’re getting through the critical community. I actually liked Goode’s portrayal of Ozmanydias, though he fails to express the heavy crown the smartest man in the world must bear. Gugino (Sin City) is terrific when she’s the young, spunky Silk Specter and the opposite of terrific when she’s the troubled, alcoholic older version on screen.
Snyder has served up the Watchmen that fans have been demanding for years, but is this really what everyone truly wanted? Snyder made an adaptation for the fans but what do the fans know except for lavish loyalty? The book utilized the medium of comic books to accentuated its story while commenting on the history of comics and superheroes, and when translated to the big screen as is Watchmen can feel like an artistic stillborn. I’m now more curious than ever to read the previous drafts out there, the ones that directors like Darren Aronofsky and Greengrass were going to film until the financing got pulled. One of the drafts transplants the world of Watchmen to modern day and replaces the nuclear brinksmanship with the Russians to the ongoing War on Terror. It may not be faithful to the fabulous source material, and it quite possibly would have made a terrible movie, but it would have been more interesting as a film project because it would have been an adaptation. Snyder’s Watchmen is reverent to a fault but I cannot complain too much. This is likely the most faithful recreation of a complex book that fans could hope for. I feel satisfied and yet unsatisfied with the finished product. It was everything I was looking for in a Watchmen movie and maybe, in the end, that was the problem. I think instead of buying the DVD I may just read the book again.
Editor’s Note: I have warmed up to this film much, much more on Blu-Ray, especially the 3-hour director’s cut. It’s Snyder’s best work to date.
Nate’s Grade: B
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