Kingsman: Secret Service; Creed; The Judge

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Andrew Ting said it best: Kingsman: The Secret Service is an amusing spy romp with an undertone of unsettling nastiness.  I’m still not sure whether that works for me or not.

Creed

Creed made me lose track of time.  Creed made me cry.  Creed didn’t move me in quite the same way as did the superlative Rocky Balboa, but you can’t blame a good movie for not being a great movie.  I’m ready for Creed II.

The Judge

There’s a scene in The Judge in which protagonist Robert Downey, Jr. tries to make an uncomfortable confession.  “This is going to be rough,” he says to himself.

This one line encapsulates my problem with the film.  At this point, I’ve already been watching for over an hour.  I know what he needs to confess, I know to whom he needs to confess it, and I can guess at the very serious consequences this confession will entail.  And yet, The Judge thinks I’m an idiot so it tells me that yes, this confession will be rough. 

This is just one of many ways The Judge thinks I’m an idiot.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it underlines the film with a score designed to inform me, in very clear terms, when to laugh and when to weep.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it’s compelled to show me, again and again, how unimaginably idyllic Indiana really is.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it expects me to believe that absolutely everyone in its protagonist’s life has been stuck in time, like mosquitos in amber, since the day Downey moved away some thirty years before.  [Interlude]Look.  I come from an idyllic small town.  My wife comes from an idyllic small town.  We each moved away from our respective idyllic small towns roughly thirty years ago.  When we return for the occasional visit, we may run into one or two people who remember us and are happy to see us.  But nobody’s accusing us of having run out, of having turned our backs on our roots.  We’re just nice people who moved away to another idyllic town.  Those old friends are happy to see us and chew the fat for a bit, but they’ve moved on.  That’s how life goes. [/Interlude]  It thinks I’m an idiot because it photographs its heroes in the golden light of hagiography, its villains in the harsh blues of villainy.  Basically, it thinks I’m an idiot.

All of which leads me to inquire: what kind of an idiot reads a script that’s basically My CousinVinny with all the jokes torn out and replaced with heavy handed family dynamics, “coming home”
mythology, and uncomfortable incest subplots, and thinks, “Bingo?”

I’m not sure, but I am sure that I’ll be very careful about investing the time to see said idiots’ next film.  I know they didn’t mean to crash the car, but that doesn’t mean I need to be in a hurry to climb back in.

Source Code

With his first feature, Moon, director Duncan Jones established himself as a filmmaker capable of creating the kind of fascinating, challenging science fiction we associate with Golden Age writers like Asimov, Bradbury, and Leiber.  With Source Code, his second feature, Jones delivers a science fiction thriller offering an intriguing premise, riveting execution, and a satisfying denoument.  Jones not only sticks the landing, he sticks the entire film.

Here’s the setup:  Captain Colter Stevens is an Army helicopter pilot who awakens strapped in a kind of time machine.  This machine comes with a twist: it puts him in the body of another man, and it can only send him to one 8-minute stretch in the man’s life: the 8 minutes before he dies.  Colter’s mission: discover who’s responsible for killing the man and everyone on the commuter train the man happened to be riding when it exploded. 

Go.  Fail.  Die.  Try again.

It’s a great premise, mixing aspects of Groundhog Day, “Quantum Leap,” and Day of the Jackal.  Jones fleshes it out with a strong cast, starring Jake Gyllenhaal (a favorite since October Sky), Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright.  He complements them with direction and photography that reveal enough to keep us oriented and in the game, but hide enough to keep us questioning and worrying our nails.

And it works.  We share Colter’s disorientation, his desperation.  We want what he wants, we feel what he feels, and we walk out of Source Code exhilarated, satisfied, and ready to live those 90 minutes over again.

With Moon and Source Code, Duncan Jones is officially two for two.  I can’t wait to see where he goes for number three.

The Manchurian Candidate

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE remake offers a twist on the paranoid thriller. It's a hippie paranoid thriller. Unfortunately, the hippie element so intrudes on the paranoid element that I had difficulty discerning whether the film wanted me to gnaw my fingernails, laugh out loud, or just peace out, man.

While the film hits many of the beats of the original, it also takes time to tap on pretty much every board of the Democratic Party's then-current platfom. From the Prescription Drug Benefit to Halliburton to G.W . Bush himself, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE sets 'em and knocks 'em down, one after another, to such an extent that it actually becomes a distraction. I mean, c'mon, Al Franken as a nightly news reporter?

That's not to say that THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE doesn't have anything going for it. Jeffrey Wright is, as usual, phenomenal; Denzel Washington is, as usual, so good that we don't notice how good he is; and Liev Schrieber makes me wonder why the hell that Mr. Clark movie never happened. None of them, however, are a match for Meryl Streep. Not only does she blow every one of them off the screen, but I bet that when this thing was running in the multiplexes, she blew everyone in all the other movies off their screens, too. She's evil, she's creepy, she's smothering, and she is 31 different flavors of awesome.

While THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is a bit slight and more than a bit hamhanded, it's worth watching for Streep's performance alone. And who knows? Maybe the hippies are right.

The Departed

When THE DEPARTED’s final credit rolled, I looked at my watch and thought, “Where did the time go?” Scorsese’s film, which clocked in at over two hours, raced by and I enjoyed every single minute. And yet, much as I liked it (and I really, really liked it), I think INFERNAL AFFAIRS is a better picture.

INFERNAL AFFAIRS, the Hong Kong Thriller remade in THE DEPARTED, stars Andy Lau and Tony Leung in the Damon and DiCaprio roles, respectively. The movies are nearly identical, with one major exception: moral ambiguity. In THE DEPARTED, Matt Damon’s character is a gangster in his heart. His decisions come from a position of self-interest and cold analysis of his situation. In INFERNAL AFFAIRS, Lau’s character began as a gangster, but he’s spent so much time on the right side of the law that he’s no longer playacting: he has conditioned himself to goodness and there’s a very real part of him that genuinely wants to become good. In THE DEPARTED, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is noble at heart. He’s so filled with horror at the demands of undercover work and sublimated fear of death that he turns to pills just to help him maintain his equilibrium. In INFERNAL AFFAIRS, Leung’s character kind of likes being a gangster: he’s grown used to it and, though he’d like to come in, we have a sense that he could continue to thrive in the underground world to which he’s become accustomed.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to like about THE DEPARTED. It’s a Scorsese picture, so of course it looks and sounds great. The cast is phenomenal, the story brisk, and situations involving. It’s a four-star movie, no doubt about it. But I like a little more moral ambiguity in my movies. INFERNAL AFFAIRS wins by a nose.