Doctor Who - The Star Beast

A Wolf In
Meep’s Clothing

Doctor Who - The Star Beast
Airdate: 25th November 2023
BBC 1 (co-produced with some other
evil studios who are ransoming it to
the rest of the world on a streaming
channel, thus becoming typical
Doctor Who villains).

So, Doctor Who - The Star Beast is the first of three Anniversary episodes to commemorate Great Britain’s favourite Timelord’s 60th year... puzzlingly airing two days after the actual 60th anniversary date but, it makes more sense to air it on the traditional Saturday evening anyway... back where it belongs. And it’s adapted from the always brilliant Pat Mills’ and Dave Gibbon’s Fourth Doctor comic strip from Doctor Who Weekly from way back when (to read more about that, see my very recent review of Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology, right here). It also marks the return of David Tennant to the role of The Doctor, making TV history by playing a second incarnation of the Timelord (who mysteriously regenerated into new clothes too... I hope they address this issue soon) and the brilliant show runner who brought the show back in the early 2000s, Russell T. Davies.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about this, to be honest. I loved the majority of the Davies era and think the show started going progressively downhill since he left. Tennant is maybe my second or third favourite Doctor of all time and I know he can act the heck out of this role so, I wasn’t worried on his behalf but, I dunno, I had mixed feelings about all this.

And, yeah... maybe I was right to.

This new show was both brilliant but tempered with some really bad stuff also. Still, my favourite Camden Town shop, Cyberdog, was featured in a few shots at the start and end of the show so... that was cool. But yeah, seriously, I also had reservations about how long an adaptation of The Star Beast could take in terms of screen time... I guessed about 15 - 20 minutes but, of course, it’s a) not about jumping through sets of panels and b) there’s all the other stuff about why The Doctor has the same face, not to mention the fallout from what would happen to Donna Noble if she ever remembers The Doctor due to her life saving memory wipe (aka she will die).

Okay, so the story worked fairly well and, it was well performed by just about everyone... and some of the comical dialogue and physical comedy was fantastic. I’m not sure that The Meep came off as evil as it should have done from the comics but... the insectoid Wrarth Warriors were well handled and the bigger budget, presumably half funded by Disney, meant it feels a little more epic than we might have hoped for but, luckily, it was directed with a deft hand and it really somehow felt more like Doctor Who than it had in a while. So that’s all good.

There were problems with it too though, at least from my perspective.

Number one was the truly cheesy, break the fourth wall opening where The Doctor and Donna are kinda filling in the back story for people. Honestly, I suspect this was added after the ‘Disney masters’ or somebody overly cautious at the BBC panicked about it because there were two reasons why this sequence didn’t work. Firstly, standing in front of a screen and filling it in with special effects later, as we’ve seen on lesser shows like The Mandalorian, doesn’t have to look that cheap. Were those matte lines I could see around The Doctor? That doesn’t really matter though... it’s Doctor Who. It’s supposed to look cheap and wobbly. However, all the bits they filled the audience in on... which was admittedly needed at some point... are already firmly flagged up and highlighted to death within the story itself. It just felt like they were repeating themselves later and it rendered the opening sequence completely superfluous anyway. So why include the bloody thing in the first place?

Number two... when the show was relaunched with Eccleston and later Tennant, all of my friends who, I assure you, are all more ‘woke’ than me (which isn’t hard... so apologies for that, I guess... not really though, I am who I am) were complaining about how politically correct and tick boxy the show had become and, in the intervening years, that aspect just kept getting worse (alienating a lot of viewers, from what I could see). And, alas, this one is absolutely devoting loads of time to being horrendously twee and ‘down with the kids’ and, it felt like it was just ramming the whole mental illness rebranded issue and so on down the throats of the viewers. It’s fine though. Unlike some of the more tolerant and modern thinking people I sometimes deal with... I can totally live with it and just ignore it when it comes up... but just wish I didn’t have to. I’ve already had one derogatory text from a much more enlightened friend than I expressing a little disappointment with this angle on last night's episode. Still... it is what it is, I suppose.

Thirdly, the IMDB and various other outlets have been lying to us again. Listed in this episode’s credits are Jemma Redgrave, Bernard Cribbins and Bonnie Langford, returning to their respective roles but... nope... none of these people are present and correct here, I’m afraid. The show and disclosure of some of its contents was always deceitful in its marketing since its return in the early 2000s and, nothing has changed it seems. I get annoyed about this stuff but move on and just carry on trusting my own instinct about what’s going to happen next... rather than attempt to get my information from the ‘official source’, so to speak.

But, those three problems aside, the episode was a hoot and I mostly had a blast with The Star Beast. I especially loved Murray Gold's score and the way he kept teasing the old Tenth Doctor action music, All The Strange Creatures, in different tempos and orchestrations throughout the episode... the Tenth Doctor's theme in Fourteenth's clothing, so to speak. And I am looking forward to seeing where the TARDIS has fled to for the next chapter (and oh, by the way guys, lovely redesign on the regenerated interiors... shame you had to blow it all up only a couple of minutes after we get to see it). The next episode has been shrouded in secrecy so it’s the one people are most wanting to see, of course. I’ll probably be late to seeing that second one, unfortunately, due to an early Christmas function but, I am still hoping to get my review up next Sunday. It just might come in the evening rather than in the morning this time. Keeping my fingers crossed I won’t have to run something else and hold it over until Monday though. Allons-y!

Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology

Meep Throat

Doctor Who -
The Fourth Doctor Anthology
Panini Comics
ISBN: 9781804911587

This is a somewhat timely reprint of all the Tom Baker likeness comic strips that appeared in the original Doctor Who Weekly and subsequent Doctor Who Monthly comics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before he changed to Peter Davidson in the strip. And when I say timely I mean, strategically marketed to come out and grab the cash at the best possible time, when readers like me will be wanting to reacquaint themselves with one Pat Mills story in particular, The Star Beast. Because, at time of writing, a modern TV adaptation of that particular strip, which ran over a few weeks, will be screening in just a few days as episode one of the new 14th Doctor 60 year anniversary specials.

I used to love the comic and I still, if moths haven’t got to them, have the first 70 or so issues up in the loft somewhere. I remember reading these issues the first time around and being completely hooked on them from the opening story (in particular). Revisiting them now, it’s certainly easy to see why. They had the absolute cream of the crop of British creative talent working on these and most, if not all, of the writers were doing the same job on Britain’s greatest comic (and in their words, the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic) 2000AD... which I also have the first thousand or so issues of, stashed away in boxes. So these stories are brought to you by giants like writers Pat Mills (the creator of 2000AD), John Wagner (co-creator of Judge Dredd) and Steve Parkhouse... not to mention artists such as Dave Gibbons and, for one brief but memorably stylised story featuring an old style Cyberman straight out of the William Hartnell story The Tenth Planet, Mike McMahon (who drew the greatest Judge Dredd strips ever... although, arguably, the same could be said of Brian Bolland).

And yeah, you can tell it’s all these 2000AD people writing this for what was, then, the British arm of Marvel, because the stories are absolutely packed chock full of action but also two very tell tale things... they are full of ideas worked into the world building and, they are equally full of dark humour coupled with brilliantly terrible puns (both visual and verbal). Not to mention, they wear their influences very much on their sleeves sometimes in terms of riffing (or let’s face it, stealing) from famous pop culture franchises.

For instance, the story Dragon’s Claw deals with the warriors of the Shaolin Temple and the myth of the 18 Bronze Men (who featured in a fair few kung fu movies) is woven into the plot. Although, in this version, the 18 Bronze Men turn out to be Sontaran warriors. Similarly, an excellent story called City Of The Damned, where a planet is ruled by leaders who have wiped out all emotional reaction from the population, must surely have taken it’s inspiration from George Lucas’ early film THX1138.

There are even a few things which directly tie it up to 2000AD stories a few times, such as the mention of a ‘Shuggy Hall’ in the story Dogs Of Doom... Shuggy was a kind of ‘crazy snooker/pool’ game played in Mega City One from the world of Judge Dredd. And in my favourite of these stories, which opens this collection, The Iron Legion (which deals with a mechanical robot army based on the Roman Empire invading parts of the galaxy, controlled by an evil race of alien entities), there’s an old broken down Robot called Vesuvias and, honestly, he’s not a far cry from Walter The Wobot, Judge Dredd’s robot butler in the early days of 2000AD.

The stories presented here range from longer, multi part stories to one off, self contained tales but, the majority of them are hits rather than misses even now, I would say. As for The Star Beast, with Beep The Meep and the alien Wraiths hunting him... well, I remembered it well so I must have liked it back in the day but, it just seems to me now like the twist in the character (which I saw coming even in my early teens) is very obvious and, that story doesn’t have too much else going for it, to be honest. Also, I’m really not sure how the story can be fleshed out to take up more than around 15 minutes of screen time so I’m guessing the TV version of The Star Beast will be padded with a lot of the falling out from the surprise regeneration at the end of the last show, The Power Of The Doctor (reviewed here) and a shaky, possibly temporary resolution (of sorts) to the Doctor/Donna problem.

That being said, anything written by Pat Mills is always going to be worth a look so I remain hopeful and, regarding Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Anthology, I remain grateful that these wonderful strips have gotten a beautiful reprint at the best possible time. I loved revisiting these stories and they’re definitely worth tracking down if you’ve never read them before.

Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD

Mills And Boom

Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD
UK 2014 (released December 2015)
Directed by Paul Goodwin
Metrodome DVD Region 2
When I heard there was a (relatively) new documentary focusing on the story of “the galaxy’s greatest comic” I got quite enthusiastic. I haven’t picked up an issue of 2000AD in about 14 years but, up until then, I had every single issue they published (and still have those boxes full of the first 1000 plus issues to this day).

I remember back in 1977, I was recovering from a fairly brutal car accident (long story and I’m not going to bother going into it here) and the first issue came out. It had a new feature on an important new movie I was just hearing about in those days. Something called Star Wars, which was due out in cinemas at the end of the year over here in the UK. However, this was not the main selling point to me or my dad. It wasn’t even the free Space Spinner (aka cheap frisbee) stuck to the front cover. We’d seen an advert on television, I think, for the comic which was basically a cartoon including some of the characters, referred to even then as ‘hyper heroes’ (presumably to avoid copyright issues with DC and Marvel) and among them was... the new Dan Dare.

I’d been hearing stories from my dad about how good Dan Dare in the Eagle comic was all my life (I was 9 years old) and so we both decided that this comic was something we should have. I read it first, loved it, and then passed it straight on to my dad to read... which was pretty much the way it was for the more than 20 years we were buying it... at first as a standing order from the local newsagents and, later, as a subscription direct from the publishers. I remember how cool the second issue was with its “biotronic man” stickers which you stuck on your arms and legs to show your machinery innards... it was one of the most painful free gifts to remove from young, hairy arms ever... even in the bath. We already had some cool strips presented to us from the comic’s host alien, The Mighty Tharg, such as Dan Dare, MACH 1, Invasion, Flesh and Harlem Heroes but, the second issue also debuted a comic book character fairly important to this day... Judge Dredd (which also crossed over into Harlem Heroes on occasion). It was all good and the cool Summer Special, out around the same time as the first couple of issues, was also pretty amazing.

I stuck with it for years but my absolute favourite strips all coincided at a period in the early to mid 1980s... Sam Slade - Robo Hunter, Ace Trucking and, the absolutely brilliant, stupendous literary masterpiece... The Ballad Of Halo Jones. It was a great time to be reading comics but the quality did dwindle by the time I gave it up, that’s for sure.

So, yeah, I was positively salivating to see what truths  and ‘behind-the-scenes’ stories to some of my favourite strips and certain famous incidents would be in Future Shock - The Story of 2000AD and... this documentary only half delivers as far as I’m concerned. Which I hate to say because there are some great talking head interviews in here with some of the great comics creators including Pat Mills, Grant Morrison, Brian Bolland, Neil Gaiman and even a quick nod from the last Dredd actor, Karl Urban.

Now the main problem is not the abundance of interview footage... far from it. There are some nice illustrations to split these up from time to time with comics either brought to life by panning around a multi-planed version of various panels (either done for real or digitally) and even some animated sections. These were quite cool although... I think there should have been more of them, to be honest.

No, my main problem is just the wealth of stuff not covered in this documentary. There were some key moments in the early history of 2000AD which I think weren’t covered here. Also, although it does at least have a few minutes on the comic’s predecessor Action (in many ways it could be seen as that, I think) and the subsequent banning of that comic by the British government, I think it could have done with a lot more exploration of the British comics scene before 2000AD to really bang home the context of how important it was, at the time, to the people reading it.

And then there were some pretty big incidents that I really would have liked to have seen covered with a little more knowledge of what was really going on that the public didn’t know about at the time.

For instance, when the second Judge Dredd multi part epic The Cursed Earth ran in the comic (if you count The Robot Wars as the first but not counting the Lunar City One stories as a multi-part tale), it got into a whole lot of trouble. Why? Well there were issues where you had Kentucky Fried Chicken's Colonel Sanders sadistically beating or killing other advertising slogan characters like Speedy the Alka Seltzer boy. There was the Jolly Green Giant, a famous frozen brand’s mascot character, who would yell “Ho! Ho! Ho!”, just like he did in the adverts at the time.... but then eat people in this particular incarnation. Or the infamous Burger Wars chapters... where rivals Ronald McDonald and Burger King would whip and kill their employees until they got it right etc. I remember a few weeks after the Jolly Green Giant stuff there was a small strip in the comic by way of a retraction, with Judge Dredd and character Spikes ‘Harvey’ Rotten eating the frozen food products and saying how good it was. I still have all these issues of course, although I haven’t read them in decades. They’ve never been allowed to be reprinted and trade paperbacks of The Cursed Earth have always been pretty light in content up until... as it happens... July 14th this year, when an uncensored reprint has finally been allowed to come out in a new hardback edition.

However, this whole incident was not covered in this documentary and it would have been nice to have known just what was going on behind the scenes at the time... how the many varied companies responded to these stories and also, how were the artists and writers allowed to get away with it by management in the first place. We loved it at the time but... I just don’t know how they had the gumption to even try to get cynical satire this dark published in a popular, weekly comic.

Another thing which seemed to go completely unmentioned in this documentary were the comic’s other related publications. For instance, they talk about, or show, characters like RoJaws and Hammerstein from RoBusters and Johnny Alpha from Strontium Dog but they actually originated in the comic StarLord. The comic was cancelled and folded into 2000AD which took on the name 2000AD and StarLord for a while. Similarly, sometime after the comic had reverted back to its lone 2000AD title, the newish comic Tornado also failed and then it became 2000AD and Tornado for a while. None of this stuff was mentioned even once in the documentary. Nor was their more mature sister publication, which I also used to love, called Crisis.

Various people in the interviews here were quick to point out how much they hated the alien editor of the comic, The Mighty Tharg but... most of the readers loved him and I would have liked to have heard more tales of how he came into being. Also, again, I would have liked them to say a few words even about the two companion comic’s hosts StarLord and Big E (Dave Gibbons in a ridiculous costume, as I recall) but there's nothing about them on here. Nor about any of those cool ‘free gifts’ the comic used to sometimes have in the early days... like the aforementioned Space Spinner, the Biotronic stickers and the Red Alert Survival Wallet! Would have been nice to have heard about this stuff, to be honest.

Then again, the documentary does give us some interesting stuff, like the ego clashes between Pat Mills, who comes across as very professional and easily ‘the man’ to be talking to in this film, and various other editors who worked on the comic later. It also charts the dip in quality, which I suspect is when I decided I’d finally had enough of the mediocrity which was going on under the name of 2000AD at a particular time, and how it’s been subsequently bought and rescued by a publishing company that understood how the comic worked and why it was so successful in the first place.

The highlight for me, in this documentary, is Neil Gaiman telling us why Alan Moore walked away from the comic and that, after the first three books of The Ballad Of Halo Jones, he had a load more books planned and how he’d once told Gaiman the story of where it was going, ending up with Halo as an old woman. Gaiman says there were tears in his eyes when he heard it and, remembering how powerful and influential to me that strip was, I still can't believe that Moore has never been offered gazillions of pounds to carry on with it.

One of the good things the documentary does do is highlight the poor working conditions, in terms of basic, decent rights for the various writers, artists etc. It also dovetails that into the time when the American comics basically poached all the best of the talent from British comics to work over there... with 2000AD being a primary source for top British talent. It talks about the big talent "defection" to the successful DC "adult brand", Vertigo Comics, and even talks to their most famous editor/nurturer of talent, Karen Berger. It spends a while on this subject and this is all fascinating stuff but, again, while I was watching all this, I was wondering why there wasn't less of this stuff and more about 2000AD itself... especially when there was so much essential stuff missing.

The purloined Tharg's Future Shocks short story that became the basis, unofficially, for director Richard Stanley's classic sci-fi movie Hardware is touched upon, especially since it really highlights, again, the poor working conditions the staff were having to suffer at the time. Of course, this leads in nicely to the obvious but perhaps often overlooked fact that 2000AD has been a major influence on all kinds of film, literature and even music in the intervening years since its inception. However, what it really doesn't touch upon too much is the amount of shameless rip-offs the writers and artists of 2000AD perpetrated themselves. Practically every time a new issue would arrive,  me and my father would read the comic and we would trade "references" we'd spotted in the issue and marvel at how these creator's were getting away with nicking it week after week. It's touched on very obliquely in a blink and you'll miss it sideways look at the reflection of the media at the time but when it comes down to mentioning things like Strontium Dog, pretty much, being a futuristic Spaghetti Western, for example, it just doesn't go there at all.

The only extras on the DVD are digital reprints of single episodes of some of the strips but the quality didn't seem that great to me and most of the double spread openings are badly split between two screens and, in the case of The Ballad Of Halo Jones, for example, doesn't retain the colours of those first two pages as they originally appeared as the colour centre spread of the issue... so not very good as a historical document either, I reckon.

All in all, this is not the best review of Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD, I know. I guess I could half recommend it to people who are totally unfamiliar with the comic but, really, it seems light on the more interesting chapters in the comic's history. Comic book  readers will no doubt find it at least, in some ways, interesting because a fair few good creators are included in the interview footage. For old school fans of the comic, however, I would say this may not be a film which covers what you would be wanting to see here. Still, at the moment it's the only documentary movie I know of that at least tries to cover this material so, not exactly a recommendation, maybe, but well done for giving it a bash, at least.

Kingsman - The Secret Service

Klebb Sandwich

Kingsman - The Secret Service
2014  UK
Directed by Matthew Vaughn 
UK cinema release print.

This movie is based on the comic book The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons but, apparently, it’s a very loose adaptation of the source material. Unfortunately, it’s not one I’ve read so I can’t say how well it does actually do in that area but my understanding is that it’s just a couple of the ideas and three of the minor characters from the comic (and even those with some changes, apparently) which were the only elements finding their way into the movie. That being said though, it’s a much better film than I was expecting, based on the look of the trailer which, to be blunt, didn’t really sell it to me. I was pleasantly surprised, however, because the movie is smartly put together, has a great screenplay courtesy of the director and Jane Goldman, and is technically quite efficient while still being stylish and warm with the various characters and situations.

It’s also quite unusually edgy considering the teenage target audience it looks like its going for but... I’ll get to that in a minute.

Kingsman - The Secret Service is, unsurprisingly, an homage to the old Bond films and various other super spy movies of the 1960s and it certainly doesn’t let you forget about it throughout the course of the movie. The film is loaded with references to various fictional ‘spy culture’ phenomena and, when you see some of this stuff coming through in the trailer, it all looks like it could turn out to be a bit of a postmodernistic jumble leading to a huge mess of a movie. Well, I’m happy to report that, while the film is, indeed, a postmodernistic jumble, the various referential and nostalgic elements which the cast and crew use to their best effect are treated more like the ingredients of a fine meal... that is to say, it’s well cooked, holds together a heck of a lot better than you think it might under all that eclectic weight and, more importantly, tastes delicious.

That being said, there are a hell of a lot of the clichés you will also associate with this kind of film and, well... just a lot of rather obvious things in general. Without spoiling it here, you probably all know where the end game of the “pick a puppy” scene in the trailer is going to go, for example, and there are lots of little moments of the expected happening with the predictable 'pay offs' left developing for later scenes. It’s certainly very formulaic, perhaps as part of the modus operandi of the ‘homage factor’ at work in this movie but, equally, there are also a lot of little surprises throughout the movie which you won’t... well not always... see coming and, despite the predictability of certain elements in this thing, it’s all done so well that you really won’t mind that you’ve seen most of it before... it’s put together in such a way that you kind of want some of the more predictable rewards to come to light within the scripting anyway.

I say it’s a postmodernistic pot pourri of its influences and it does, I have to say, wear these on it’s digital sleeve throughout the movie. The fact that the cover for the entrance to Kingsman HQ is a tailor shop on Saville Row, linked back to the origins of the Kingsman group and the history they are given in the film, will probably ring a few bells with the audience. It harkens back to the early James Bond movies and the fact that director Terence Young had Sean Connery taken to a tailor in Saville Row for the suits for Dr. No (reviewed here). Another reference, among many, is the appearance of the Rosa Klebb style knife boot, popularised by that character in Fleming’s original novel From Russia With Love (in the book she kills Bond with it, only for him to be resurrected by popular demand in the next book, Dr. No) and, of course, brought to life in the film of the same title by Lotte Lenya (my review of From Russia With Love can be found here). Bond films are also the subject of a discussion between Colin Firth’s Harry Hart character and Samuel L. Jacksons super villain Valentine, played much better and much more ruthlessly than you might expect from the way the trailer has been cut together.

Valentine’s beautiful henchwoman Gazelle, played by actress Sofia Boutella (a male character in the comic books) has a pair of prosthetic lower legs manifested as sharpened blades with which she can accomplish all manner of gory violence... which she, of course, does. This in itself referencing a number of Bond villains of the past who have had a lethally enhanced handicap ostentatiously transformed to their deadly advantage (think the title character of Dr. No,  or Jaws from both The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker etc).  Even one of the posters for the movie is a parody of the old, controversial at the time, For Your Eyes Only advertising. So when I say the movie wears its influences on its sleeve, it is at least a well tailored sleeve and it does so in the most haute couture manner possible.

There’s some lovely stuff going on with the cinematography and editing too... some of which looks well thought out in terms of the way the shots are cut together long before certain specific set ups are even filmed. For example, there’s a nice rolling montage of four or five shots about a third of the way through the movie which has the camera moving from the bottom of the screen to the top and as it reaches the top of the scrolling screen (which is travelling downwards, obviously), a clear and well designed frame stop comes into view and peels into the next part of the scrolling montage. It’s a way of getting the basic messages over quickly and efficiently as to where different elements in the story are heading but, it also pays homage to the film’s comic book routes by presenting scrolling frames which could perhaps be read by some as an echo of comic book panels... so this was all rather well thought out. The camera had to pan through the shots at exactly the same speed to make the edit  work... although that may be an added movement in post production for all I know... but however it was achieved, it all works rather well.

I said the film was quite edgy for the teenage audience it’s going for. By that I don’t mean it’s inappropriate, far from it, but it is quite gutsy of the movie company to let it through in this form bearing in mind the way the BBFC have de-clawed anything and everything in recent memory and I applaud the company for it (there seems to be some disagreement as to whether there were cuts for the UK market or not). Where would the hero of a movie be offered, and make good on, the prospect of anal sex with a princess if he saves the world, for example... no, I’m not making this stuff up.

The film is also very violent, quite spectacularly so a lot of the time. I don’t want to spoil too much of this for people who, like me, are going to go in relatively blind, but there’s a scene utilising a curiously British adorned version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture which will really make people pay attention (and hopefully giggle uncontrollably) and there’s a lovely little breakdance sequence where Gazelle faces off against the film’s main protagonist Eggsy (played likeably by newcomer Taron Egerton) which will hopefully bring a smile to your face too. The violence in both of these sequences is mostly used to comic effect but there’s also a more serious tone to the violent shenanigans of some of the characters too...

The main premise of the way Valentine intends to threaten mankind, for example, is all tied into a plot device which, when activated, brings on a kill crazy spree of brutal violence not unlike the pseudo-zombies in the 28 Days/Weeks Later movies. There’s a brilliant sequence which is a full on 5 or more minutes of fight choreography involving Colin Firth which is both stylistically brutal but which also shows off one of my favourite things about the action sequences in this movie... they are all edited together so well that, even in a free flow melee involving 80 or more people, you aren’t going to get confused or lost in the choreography. Which is pretty impressive if you think about it, and one of the arts of modern action film-making that seems to have fallen by the way side a little with some directors.

The acting performances are all superb and the editing and pacing all flows right along to give the audience a path through the movie which never once gets boring. The sound design is also pretty amazing, with the sound of the gunshots in particular seeming to have a lot more presence in the mix, so that they sometimes surprise you with their speed and intensity on the soundtrack. Like I said... the film is quite edgy.

And last but by no means least, we have the score composed by Henry Jackma and Matthew Margeson, which really does have one foot in the modern world of action scoring and one foot in the sixties. At various times throughout the course of the movie, the same kind of slow build ostinato fugues that John Barry used to conjure up for such Bond films as You Only Live Twice (reviewed here) and Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here) are referenced both structurally and in terms of their orchestration, to give the audience a big hit of nostalgic, sixties, super-spy magic at the appropriate places in the narrative. This is all good stuff and I’ll certainly be ordering the CD when it comes out later in the month (hopefully).

At the end of the day, Kingsman - The Secret Service is a big popcorn movie for teenagers and adults alike. It is unashamedly this but, since it also hits all the right notes in terms of tone and does so in a technically competent and brilliant manner throughout, I think even the most jaded popcorn warriors will be hard pushed not to get a thrill out of this one and, frankly, the slightly lengthy running time just whizzes along and will leave you wanting more. I know I’m hoping for a sequel at some point, if the creative people can bring the same kind of charm and intensity to the finished product that this one has. A really great little movie and a definite hard recommend from me. Enjoy.