Review: Kingsman: The Golden Circle (UK Cert 15)

Three years after Kingsman: The Secret Service introduced us to Eggsy, Harry and Merlin, the boys are back together for highly anticipated sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, once again directed by Matthew Vaughn. 

When an attack wipes out nearly all of the Kingsmen, the surviving members (Eggsy and Merlin) have to get help from their transatlantic cousins, the Statesmen, to find out who was behind the attack. Along the way, Eggsy is reunited with Harry Hart, thought dead after being shot by Richmond Valentine. But Harry isn't Harry. Can Eggsy get through to him and stop the dastardly schemes of a cunning drug cartel operator before her deadly merchandise wipes out a large portion of the worldwide population?

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is loud, ludicrous, bombastic, silly... and bloody brilliant. Easily one of the best films I've seen this year.

This could have easily been a lazy, by-the-numbers cash-cow retread of the original film. And whilst they do reuse some of the scenarios from the first film (there is a bar-fight, there is a car-chase), screenwriters Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn are careful to add a different twist on it so expectations are confounded. There's still a gleefully anarchic streak here, but whereas the first film mined some comedy out of the class differences between council estate boy Eggsy and the other posh toffs in Kingsmen training, here the differences between the US and the UK come in for some ribbing. Luckily, this culture-clash comedy doesn't overpower anything else that goes on. Just as in the first film, there are some interesting social comments made (here about why some drugs are illegal and others legal, and how you wage a war on drugs) but it never feels like tubthumping or soapbox standing. It blends in nicely to the overarching, over-the-top, narrative. 

The Statesmen team, all named after drinks instead of figures from mythology, are a great addition to the Kingsman world with Jeff Bridges impressing as their leader Champagne, Halle Berry adding much-needed tech support as Ginger, and Channing Tatum charming as the bruiser Tequila. However it is Game Of Thrones' Pedro Pascal as agent Whiskey who stands out; he's a dab hand with a lasso and more than willing to kick a little ass if needed.

As for the Kingsmen? Well, both Taron Egerton and Mark Strong slip back into their roles like a well-tailored suit. Eggsy hasn't gone full gentleman; he still has his friends on the estate and- even when looking as dapper as all get out- he's quick with a well-placed swear-word. You can take the boy out of the estate... it's a warm and winning performance by Egerton. And it's Strong by name and strong by nature as the tech wizard provides Eggsy and Harry with support and forms a lovely bond with his opposite number Ginger. Colin Firth is superb as Harry and I love the way the script plays with the idea that Harry might not be the full shilling. 

Julianne Moore is inspired casting for the big bad, Poppy Adams. A ruthless drug cartel operator with a penchant for 50s kitsch Americana and industrial meat mincers, she wanders round her fortress- PoppyLand- like Martha Stewart on crack, mercilessly dispatching those who displease her. You can tell Moore is having a ball vamping it up as the villain, but she never goes into caricature. There is also an extended cameo by Elton John which is absolutely hilarious. I won't say any more, but his screen-time is a particular highlight in a film full of great scenes. 

There is also an absolutely jaw-dropping, audacious sequence when Eggsy tries to plant a tracer on an unsuspecting mark which had me absolutely howling with laughter and dumbstruck that they'd been able to get it past the BBFC! You will know it when you see it.

It's a film which achieves a delicate balance between heartfelt drama, raucous comedy, and high-octane action without any one element overwhelmed by or dominating another. I would happily sit through it again at the cinema. It's rare to make a sequel that matches the heights of its original, but for me Kingsman: The Golden Circle delivers in spades. 

Rating: 5 out of 5

Tez

Review: Kingsman: The Secret Service (UK Cert: 15)

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a fan boy’s wish list of a homage to the Roger Moore Bond films. That’s the great thing about director Matthew Vaughn’s latest (Kick Ass, X-Men: First Class, Layer Cake), but is also its biggest problem.

Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is a young man with plenty of talent and potential, but is stuck in a rut, stealing cars for fun, spending what money he has down the local boozer, and forced to put up with his thuggish stepdad’s constant putdowns. After a run-in with the police, Eggsy is recruited by Harry Hart (Colin Firth) to join international spy agency Kingsman, where not only must he prove himself during training, he also has to survive it.

The performances in Kingsman are all solid. Colin Firth steals the show as Harry Hart. He’s suave, delivers a droll one-liner at a moment’s notice, and he’s deadly; the man can literally kick ass. While a couple of set-pieces have clearly been tinkered by CGI, Firth does the majority of his own fights. Firth, who rose to fame as Mr Darcy in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, is just as convincing and lethal as Daniel Craig’s Bond or Matt Damon’s Bourne. Samuel L Jackson hams it up as the film’s megalomaniac villain, having plenty of fun with his scenes. Valentine is text book Bond villain (including a secret underground lair), but at least Jackson gives plenty of charisma and laughs. Mark Strong gets something to do for once as Merlin, Kingsman’s answer to Q; not just standing in a lab creating lethal new toys, Strong gets in on the action as well. Sophie Cookson, as fellow recruit Roxy, gets a female supporting role where she’s not just eye candy, she’s got the brains and able to knock someone out just as well as the boys, the only problem is the film’s climax, where Cookson is literally moved out the way (Earth’s upper atmosphere – you can’t get further away!) so that Egerton can take the glory.

As for Egerton, you can’t argue that he’s got the personality to hold the film together, it’s just a shame that Eggsy has been written as a massive Daily Mail stereotype: baseball cap, hoodie, trainers, lives in a dingy London flat with his cockney tart mum (Eastenders’ Samantha Womack), and steals things because he’s bored, Eggsy is Britain’s middle class view of working class youth. Young people in this country are more complicated than that and Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (admittedly adapting Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel) took the easy way out when they came up with Eggsy.

As you would expect from the director of Kick Ass, Kingsman’s violence is over-the-top splatter. Some critics have described the gore as stomach-turning, but its larger-than-life, realism be damned gore, much like Tarantino’s Kill Bill instead of the projectile vomit inducing antics of Eli Roth’s Hostel. Kingsman’s stand out scene is what appears to be one solid take as Firth wipes out the congregation of a racist, homophobic – everything ending in ‘ist’ or ‘ic’ – church, easily rivalling the ballet style choreography of Gareth Evans’ Raid films.

Vaughn gives us a faithful recreation of the larger than life spy films that were the norm before The Bourne Identity and Casino Royale ruined the party, whilst also coming up with a few of its own ideas (the world’s population massacring each other to the soundtrack of KC and the Sunshine Band’s Give It Up). The trouble is, because Kingsman rigidly sticks to the formula we all know and love, there are no surprises, and even the script’s shock twists were done before in Bond films from years back. You have the gadgets, cars, girls, double-crossings, the henchwoman with razor sharp blades for legs, explosions, innuendos  - everything you could want from a trip down memory lane, and Kingsman is a hell of a lot of fun, but it doesn’t have quite enough that’s new or never-saw-that-coming to make it something you definitely need to go and watch.

3 out of 5

Matt

Review: Before I Go To Sleep (UK Cert: 15)

Having sustained a head injury after a brutal attack, Christine (Nicole Kidman) is now an amnesiac. The minute she goes to sleep, she forgets everything, waking up and thinking she’s still in her twenties. Christine has two men in her life, her husband Ben (Colin Firth), who tries to care for her, and Dr Mike Nash (Mark Strong), who is helping her remember what happened on the night she was attacked. Soon Christine begins to suspect that both men have been lying.

Director Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of S.J. Watson’s bestselling novel, Before I Go To Sleep, is a tough film to review for anyone wanting to go and watch it. While not wanting to spoil anything, the film has one hell of a whole of Africa-sized flaw. Having watched the trailer, I had an inkling who the villain was here, the Who in the Whodunnit. Ten minutes into Before I Go To Sleep, and the only way it could be more obvious who the bad guy is if they had a neon sign flashing above their head, which reads, “I did it!”

As I’ve not read the book, I can’t comment on whether this is an issue with the source material, but because of a certain actor’s dubious behaviour, and the fact that – as far as mysteries go – they’re playing a by-the-numbers staple of the genre, it’s not long before you’ve already worked out most of what’s happening.

This is a real shame, as otherwise Before I Go To Sleep is a reasonably well made, occasionally even tense thriller. While none of the performances are career best, everybody does a solid enough job, especially Kidman who specialises in playing fractured women. Here she’s wide-eyed, her voice barely above a whisper, childlike in her curiosity and reaction to discovering the type of person she is. Even the cinematography makes you wonder whether Christine is going mad, if there’s any mystery here at all, Ben Davis shooting every scene with muted colours, external shots being bizarrely empty, with scarcely anyone around.

The trouble with Before I Go To Sleep is that unless you think Scooby Doo is the crowning glory of crime thrillers, you’re unlikely to be surprised at the film’s many twists and pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you moments, which just about kills most of the tension that Joffe has tried hard to craft here. Throughout the film I was hoping I was wrong, that there would be this bulldozer of a twist that turned things on its head and put a line through what I thought I knew; tragically, this never happens. Joffe tries to come up with a thriller worthy of Hitchcock, but too often the script for Before I Go To Sleep (penned by Joffe) feels like a TV movie on a never-heard-of digital channel.

2 out of 5

Matt

Review: The Railway Man (UK Cert 15)

There are plenty of war films as well as its many sub-genres out there, but out of all of them I would pick the Prisoner of War film as the most difficult to make, largely because what can be said about the atrocities that prisoners experienced has already been skilfully done, leaving little room to add anything new. For me, not just the very best Prisoner of War film, but one of the finest war films ever made, is Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter.

Jonathan Teplitzky’s adaptation of the memoirs of Japanese prisoner of war, Eric Lomax, gives us something different in that Lomax forgave his tormentor, Takashi Nagase, who, while Nagase did not physically torture Lomax, he did something arguably worse: he stood by and did nothing.

The Railway Man ticks all the boxes for awards glory, critical and commercial success, and ending up in a large number of DVD collections. While the film is a decent enough way to spend two hours, it does feel like a waste. Instead of being a good film, this could have been a highlight in Firth and Teplitzky’s careers.

The problem lies first and foremost with Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Andy Paterson’s script, which jumps wildly between Lomax in the eighties (Colin Firth) and his time in the prisoner of war camp (played by Jeremy Irvine), rushing at breakneck speed towards the credits. For a film that centres on purgatory and redemption, The Railway Man spends little time exploring these themes.

Considering the acting talent involved, no one is given all that much to work with. Firth fares best, doing a convincing job portraying a man who is plagued by traumas of the past, but at no point is he stretched. The film would have been far more interesting if we were shown more of Lomax’s day-to-day life as he struggles with his demons, distancing himself from his wife, their marriage at breaking point. Instead, apart from a powerful moment when Lomax wakes from one of his nightmares, traumatised, and a handful of scenes where Lomax shuts himself away, we never get a full understanding of how Lomax’s experiences as a prisoner affected him. As Nicole Kidman explains, whenever she asks her husband about his experiences in Japan, “He changes the subject,” which more or less sums up The Railway Man and how it treats its protagonist: it changes subject, hurriedly moves on from one scene to the next.

Jeremy Irvine is first-rate as the younger Lomax, mimicking Firth’s diction and mannerisms. Sadly, Irvine gets lumbered with a clichéd role as the shy, frightened soldier who stands up to his captors; he is not given the chance to do anything else. The only reason we sympathise with the young Lomax is because we witness the terrible ways he is tortured. It feels like a cheap trick to side with a character just because we see them get beaten black and blue.

Hiroyuki Sanada holds your attention during what little time he has onscreen. As an older Nagase, he also has his scars, spending his life trying to atone for the past. Despite Firth appearing virtually throughout the film, it is Sanada’s scenes that pack the biggest emotional punch. While The Railway Man has its fair share of problems, it is impossible not to be moved in the film’s climactic scene.

While the trailer for The Railway Man had the acting credits as Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, Kidman has very little to do in the film except look concerned for her husband; there are long stretches in the film where she does not even appear. While Kidman’s role is solely as a narrative device – Lomax still has something to live for – Patricia could have been far more fleshed out. She is a devoted wife, struggling to cope as her husband becomes more and more introverted, none of which is shown in any great detail. Scarcely any screen time is invested in Patricia which, when you have an actress as peerless as Kidman, is a real waste.

Stellan Skarsgård as the older Finlay is the most short-changed, acting-wise. Like Patricia, he is another narrative device. Finlay would rather bury his trauma, live his life in silence, than try and deal with it. He is a living, breathing ghost, with no trace of a life, and is what Lomax will become if he does not confront his demons. Yet the older Finlay appears on screen for all of five minutes, his dialogue largely exposition or pushing the narrative along. An actor as consistently outstanding as Skarsgård deserves better than this (see Marius Holst’s King of Devil’s Island for one of Skarsgård’s stand-out performances), having been given a role he can scarcely do anything with.

Considering this is a film largely set in Japan and tells the story of a man obsessed with the world’s most scenic railways, the cinematography and editing is nothing special. The visuals in the film tell the story, no more, no less. Personally, I can forgive a film that visually does nothing new if a director has paid more attention to the actors and storytelling, but Teplitzky does none of this. The Railway Man is in too much of a rush, never taking the time to explain anything or get inside the heads of its characters.

Despite all of this, The Railway Man is a decent watch, thanks largely to Firth and Sanada. The film hurries towards Lomax confronting Nagase and these scenes are, for the most part, well handled. There is real tension as Lomax interrogates Nagase, followed by moments that are genuinely moving, Lomax realising that Nagase is not the same man who mistreated him all those years ago. The script does not explore these characters, how they have both suffered, as much as it should, but Firth and Sanada make their scenes together immensely powerful. The last twenty minutes of The Railway Man feels like a different film entirely; it is gentle, thoughtful, and takes its time. When dealing with a story as moving and profound as Lomax’s, this is how Teplitzky should have structured his film, but instead he is in a mad rush, covering as much ground as he can, giving few of the film’s scenes the depth they deserve.

The Railway Man is a passable war film, when, considering the source material and the talent on board, it should have been one of the greatest.

3 out of 5

Matt