Argylle

Diamond Geezah!

Argylle
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
USA/UK
2024 Apple Films
UK Cinema Print

Now I loved Matthew Vaughn’s first Kingsman film (reviewed here) and, after seeing the trailer for Argylle, it looked like a movie tailor-made for me and very much in the same kind of ballpark. And then the warnings started coming in... I mean, really bad word of mouth about it. Indeed, it seems to be both a critical and financial bomb which is really not going to do the director any favours. Still, I soldiered on to the cinema because the trailer really had been enticing, in the hopes that I was out of step with other audience members... remembering that some of the best films made met with a similar lack of enthusiasm.

And, wow, all I can say is... the kinds of people who are not appreciating Argylle are obviously the same kinds of audiences who don’t appreciate films like Barbarella, Modesty Blaise, Our Man Flint and any other number of psychedelic masterpieces you could mention. This is seriously good cinema and I can only hope that, since it’s made by Apple, they see fit to give it a proper physical release because I want to grab the Blu Ray of this to show some people as soon as possible.

Now, a full on blow by blow of the plot would possibly spoil things for the slower thinkers in the audience but, I feel I can at least say as much as the trailer gives away, to give a flavour of the story. Secret agent Argylle, played by Henry Cavill, is the typical James Bond (more like a halfway house between Derek Flint and Matt Helm) who opens the film with a particualarly strong dance, shoot and chase scene.... before it’s revealed to the audience that he’s actually the lead character in the book series of successful writer Elly Conway, played by Bryce Dallas Howard. That’s the first twist. The second twist, also revealed in the trailer, is that she meets a guy played by Sam Rockwell on a train journey and he really is a secret agent, who is then trying to save her life as an evil agency wants what’s in her head. Oh... and she has a funny cat which she carries around in a satchel. And that’s all you’re getting in terms of plot from me. There are more twists and turns and I’m guessing most people will definitely see them all coming long before they happen... but that doesn’t stop this thing from being a very watchable movie.

The film turns into a funny, deadly, glamourous and certainly colourful action spy movie which, not for even one second (I’m glad to say), takes itself even remotely seriously. And perhaps that’s what turns some people off... the film loses contact with reality at some point and the tone shifts into an absolutely stylish mix of psychedelia and silliness... which is right up my street. I do apporeciate silly situations and even silly people when the right ones enter my life (Hi Katrin!) and, this movie has it in spades, it has to be said.

There’s a whole host of famous actors in this too, including Samuel L. Jackson, Bryan Cranston, John Cena and even the great Sofia Boutella... and they all do a good job here playing things as straight as they need to doing with this kind of coherent brand of ridiculous shenanigans. Howard and Rockwell are both especially good in this one, it has to be said.

Also great is Lorne Balfe’s quite beautiful and sweeping score which, I really wouldn’t have guessed was by this composer at all. Alas, the damn thing isn’t out in any kind of format to date (not even a proper CD) so I’m not going to be able to listen to this one as a stand alone experience anytime soon, I’m guessing. Which is a shame and, once again, shows the short sightedness of the people on these movies who make that kind of decision.

All in all, I’d have to say I had a very good time with Argylle. The tonal shift from ‘just about credible’ to full-on bonkers is probably going to put off many people (as I think is evidenced by the box office) but I loved the film, especially (and without trying to give too much away), the ‘Tommy Crown’ coloured smoke, dance assault scene and the ‘oil skating’ scene, both of which were big hits for me. I don’t understand why, as is already clear, some people aren’t able to embrace this kind of audacious cinematic spectacle but, there you have it, it’s getting bad reviews and doing poor business but... I don’t care. I loved it and I think people who are into 1960s ‘camp/spoof’ cinema especially will have a good time with it. 

Kingsman - The Golden Circle

Kingdemonium

Kingsman - The Golden Circle
UK/USA 2017 Directed by Matthew Vaughn
UK cinema release print.

Disclaimer: The only real spoilers you will see in here can all be easily gleaned from the trailer. However, if you haven’t seen the trailer then I would urge you to go in blind.

So the time is already upon us when we get the first and, possibly, not the last sequel to Kingsman - The Secret Service, a film which I loved and reviewed here. Now, it has to be said that I was was really not looking forward to a sequel to that first movie because, while Taron Egerton as Eggsy and Mark Strong as Merlin were bound to be back for the next one, I thought that Colin Firth’s stand out role of Galahad (aka Harry Hart) was an important ingredient in making the whole thing work. Well Vaughn and co-writer, the often quite wonderful Jane Goldman, obviously thought so too because they managed to find a way to bring Firth’s character back which, while utterly implausible in real life, doesn’t really stretch the credibility of the hyper-real world of the ‘Kingsman universe’ too much and... a little more on that later. That being said, I have seen a lot of negative comments about the film being either dull or unwatchable from several quarters on Twitter and the like over the last couple of weeks so... yeah... I wasn’t exactly holding my breath to wait and see this one.

However, as it happens, it’s my firm belief that the bad criticism I’ve heard of it is, for me at least, quite wrong. Not only does Kingsman - The Golden Circle live up to and honour the spirit of the original movie, it also builds on that world fairly successfully and, to boot, is another fun ride. It’s quite true that it isn’t quite near as good as the first one but, honestly, that would be a pretty tall task. However, what the cast and crew have delivered here is a solid, action comedy super-spy thriller which, although I’m sure it completely strays from the comic book source as much or, posssibly, even more than the original movie did, is a nice slice of cinematic spectacle and, I would have thought, a bit of a crowd pleaser. There are, it has to be said, quite a lot of what I would call minor problems with it but, ultimately, these don’t add up to a significant movie killer and the film coasts along quite nicely with, as the first one, a real feeling of empathy and good will conjured up for the main protagonists to succeed in their mission.

Okay so, the three cast I’ve mentioned above are supported by a very strong, somewhat misused in cases, cast which boasts several big names. Julianne Moore is excellent as Poppy, this film’s super-villain, although I believe she is written quite badly and it does hurt the film a little, I think, that Eggsy and Harry don’t actually get to meet or interact with her until their final confrontation scene. So, excellent as she always is, she does tend to feel like she’s been plonked into the film in a corner to just cut back to every now and again in an effort to remind us that there is an evil mastermind making all these things happen in the film. Which is a shame.

Similarly, Channing Tatum is in this but you’d barely know it. His role is quite small and, although he stays the course of the film, the plot line treats him as just an example of how deadly the super-villain’s plan is... like he’s an egg timer so you know how crucial the mission is getting. Jeff Bridges is similarly wasted as the boss of Statesman, the US counterpart to Kingsman and Halle Berry is also not given much to do as the US version of Mark Strong’s Merlin character. I was surprised to see an excellent singer, Tara Hugo, in a little cameo as a bar maid. I don’t know much about her or even, to be honest, that she was also an actress but she brought out a truly great album of Philip Glass songs a year or two ago which is worth giving a listen to. And talking of singers, I was similarly caught unawares to see that Elton John has such a large and crucial part in the story. He’s like ‘the cameo that never goes away’ and he has some nice little moments during the course of the film. There are quite a few more ‘name’ actors putting in appearances in this one but if I list them all I’d be here all day and this would be the longest, scroll hungry review ever... so I won’t.

These people are all good, of course but, it was the surprise reappearance of a number of characters and actors from the first film which really helped pull this one together. A couple of main players are back but I don’t want to spoil the surprise if you haven’t seen this one yet. That being said, as in the first movie, the writers are not afraid to kill off well loved characters and, by the time this film is done, I found I wasn’t eyeing any further sequels with much anticipation after the loss of yet another main ingredient of the series... at least in my eyes.

The film is a joy to watch, though, for the most part and the director has got this really nice thing going with scene transitions which are reflected from the end of one scene into the next... so a pile of drugs will be the side of a mountain next to Poppy’s secret lair, a hole punched through a wall in that lair will be the hole left on the bomb site of the Kingsman shop in London and a bottle of whiskey would morph into a big building in Kentucky shaped like the bottle of whiskey, etc. It’s a nice touch and it really works through the movie without being overdone to the point that it begins to wear thin.

The stunt work and action in this is also great and there’s the usual strong humour undercutting things as it did first time around. Colin Firth’s resurrection is handled particularly well in that he doesn’t immediately snap into mission mode and a lot of scenes of him not being able to remember who he was are not rushed unduly. The way he is brought back into himself, as it were, hinges on the credibility of an ‘expanded’ flashback to part of the original film that everyone remembers and it’s done very well. Even the scene where he goes into a deliberate parallel scene of his famous “manners maketh man” moment from the first doesn’t go as you’d expect it to, being used to simultaneously show that the resurrection isn’t completely taken, as yet and also used to try, not all that successfully, to up the stakes with another character to give the final quarter of the film a little more edge... but, again, I can’t say anything more here because it’s quite definitively in spoiler territory (although a certain plot twist could be deduced from the trailer and I was wondering about a certain possible reveal before I even started watching the movie, to be honest). And even the resurrection of another character (who appears in the film right from the start) is pretty well accounted for and makes total sense, in all fairness.

All this being said, though, the film does have a fair few problems too. For one, a cable car sequence relies on having the car fitted with something which is both completely useless to anyone, super-villain or not, and makes absolutely no sense. Nobody would have a cable car that could do what it does here and, especially, for absolutely no good reason or practical use as it is portrayed during this sequence. Similarly, a character who is branded as part of ‘The Golden Circle’ would surely not let themself be played in the way that Eggsy plays that person in this movie. You can’t claim that a specific character is a naive person if we’ve already been shown how rigorous a ritual it is to be allowed to be a member of The Golden Circle. It makes no sense.

Another big problem is the quality of the action. Like I said, it’s all great but it also feels a little anti-climactic at times because the opening action sequence of the film which involves a fight and chase in a Kingsman cab (as seen on the trailers) is so blisteringly good and makes for such a strong introduction to the film, that nothing else in the movie really feels as intense as that again. Great opening though. However, for a film that does a lot to link in with the first to the point of both replaying scenes and setting up parallel versions of some of those set pieces, then I was bemused that the two most talked about orgies of violence from the first - the blood rage church sequence and the head exploding sequence - had no alternate versions explored in this one and... I felt it really needed something as extreme as those towards the end of this one to keep the feel a little closer to the first.

The film is probably, I suspect, not all that great as a stand alone movie either. There are a lot of jokes and nods to the first one but some of them are quite subtle and rely on knowledge gleaned from that movie. For instance, when an exchange between two characters goes to saving the world, unless you’ve seen the first one then you won’t know what that little hook in the conversation is all about and no idea that they’re really talking about anal sex. Similarly, when we are shown Eggsy’s Kingsman office in his flat, people who haven’t seen the first one may not understand why three, completely unglamourous newspaper front pages are decorating the wall. Even when Colin Firth’s character is being questioned by Merlin about the exact same thing, unless you know what Firth’s explanation of the newspapers is in the first film, you may find yourself scratching your head as to the significance of these questions. So this really is a film for people who are familiar with the first... not least because so many scenes from the first one are ‘given away’ here. That’s not particularly a problem, mind you and I prefer it like this but... I can see how some people might get lost in this one.

However, even with all the minus points, the film still manages to be a cut above many others which have tried... and failed... to do this kind of thing properly. They've also convinced me that the time is right for somebody to have a crack at a movie version of The Ballad Of Halo Jones at some point soon please (anybody who remembers Toby will know exactly what I'm talking about when they see this).

And the score, once again by composers Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson from the first film, creates the all important musical continuity which so many big screen franchises (Marvel, DC, Alien, Star Trek etc) get wrong. The Kingsman theme is used more, has instant recognition value here and I suspect I’m going to be playing this score a lot more than the first one when it comes out on CD at the end of next month. It even, apparently, has some of Jackman’s score for X-Men - First Class deliberately used for a certain scene here.

All in all, then, Kingsman - The Golden Circle is a great night out at the movies. Not devoid of problems but definitely one which I think fans and admirers of the first film will enjoy a lot. Like I said earlier, I can’t see how a third movie would be able to work without a certain ‘ingredient’ in the mix but, hey, there’s at least a possible replacement character already lined up for that role here, I suppose, so... lets see how the box office on this one goes before we write off another sequel.

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.