Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Posted on September 21, 2017 at 2:54 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sequences of strong violence, drug content, language throughout and some sexual material
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and drunkenness, drugs and drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Extensive, very graphic peril and violence with many characters injured and killed, sad deaths, disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 22, 2017
Date Released to DVD:	December 11, 2017

The ultra-elite and impeccably tailered Kingsmen are back, well, a couple of them, in this stylish and slightly less transgressive sequel from writer/director Matthew Vaughn, based on the graphic novels by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. A couple of stunning action sequences, a delicious villain named Poppy (Julianne Moore), and Elton John(!) make it a watchable entertainment, and the return of two characters who were killed in the first film makes the dispatching of many more characters more cheeky than tragic.

Eggsy (Taron Egerton) has come a long way from the unrefined street kid of the first film. He is now happily living with the Swedish princess (Hanna Alström), wearing elegant bespoke suits, and still happily hanging out with his old friends and his dog, JB. But he is kidnapped by Charlie (Edward Holcroft), the former rival he thought was killed in the mayhem of the first chapter. It turns out Charlie only lost an arm, now replaced with a prosthetic that has a mind of its own, and his voice, also with a mechanical replacement. There’s a terrifically kinetic fight and chase scene, suitably accompanied by Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” that starts the movie off with a bang.

Then just about all the Kingsmen are killed off and Eggsy and Merlin (Mark Strong, with a Scottish burr and a soft spot for John Denver) have to meet up with their American counterparts, the Statesmen to save the world from Poppy, a ruthless international drug dealer with the demeanor of a 1950’s TV commercial happy housewife. She responds to betrayal like it is ring around the collar or waxy yellow buildup, except than instead of finding a better cleaning product, she puts those who fail her through a meat grinder. Literally.

Poppy would like to live in the world of the 1950’s, or, rather, the 50’s as portrayed in nostalgic re-creations like “Grease” and “Happy Days,” and has created an adorable Disney-style replica in the midst of the South American jungle, where she directs worldwide operations of her highly successful drug manufacture and distribution business. But she wants more.

The filmmakers are clearly having a blast and that is fun for us, except when it goes overboard. It is much too long at nearly two and a half hours. Channing Tatum is a hoot but his section of the story is entirely expendable. And it is a shame that once again, Halle Berry is utterly wasted in a role that uses her for screen candy. Same with her fellow Oscar-winner, Jeff Bridges, whose appearance is all crag and chaw. But the third Oscar-winner, Colin Firth, also playing a character who was killed in the first movie except not because who cares, is a pleasure to watch, as he has to play his character as much younger and more benignly innocent, and then again as sophisticated and determined. Elton John is a hoot as himself and the movie has a bubbly, delirious quality that excuses almost as much as it hopes it will.

Parents should know that this film includes extended very explicit peril and violence with many characters injured and killed and some disturbing and graphic images including characters being put into a meat grinder and some gruesome deaths, strong language, drugs and drug dealing, sexual references and situations with some graphic images.

Family discussion: How are the Statesmen different from the Kingsmen? Why did Merlin make that choice?

If you like this, try: the first “Kingsman” movie and “Our Man Flint”

xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

Posted on January 19, 2017 at 5:28 pm

This ridiculous but ridiculously entertaining third chapter in the “XXX” action series is basically script by Mad Libs: Let’s have Vin Diesel in a . Which is how we get a motorcycle race over water and a ski jump into jungle. Plus a shoot-out in zero gravity. And why not. Sick of winter? Tired of the news? Here is a summer movie in January, with chases and explosions for days, badassery of all kinds, and many thousand yard stares, all presented for your delectation in gorgeous IMAX 3D.

So, to recap. In the first XXX movie, released in 2002, extreme sports and extreme tattoo anti-hero and adrenaline junkie Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) was recruited by federal agent Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) to do some tasks that normal military and government operatives were not cool and crazy enough to do. Chapter 2, “XXX: State of the Union” (2005) had Ice Cube stepping in for the reportedly deceased Cage. Twelve years later, it turns out that Xander Cage was just too cool to kill. He’s been enjoying life with crazy stunts and beautiful ladies. But tracks him down because has to be taken away from , and so once again his special skills are needed.

That special ops boss is Marke, played by Toni Collette as though she is doing a bad drag queen impression of herself, as opposed to the good drag queen impression she did in “Connie and Carla.” She helpfully provides X with a team of military tough guys. He dispatches them quickly by throwing them off a plane and rounds up his own Benneton ad of a team, a motley crew of wisecracking with and no fear: “the bad, the extreme, the completely insane,” we are reminded, as though that isn’t the very reason we are there. The movie helpfully skips over exposition that might get in the way of chases, explosions, shoot-outs, fight scenes, and quippy threats and bragging by providing helpful title cards for each character outlining, like Power Point on crack, their most significant achievements, characteristics, and useful other information like their go-to karaoke song or the fact that one of them, meeting with Samuel L. Jackson, thinks he is being recruited for the Avengers.

Everyone loves to run, jump, shoot, and fight except for Nina Dobrev as the Velma of this Scooby-Doo crowd, with oversize glasses, super-duper tech ability, and an inability to stop talking around X. She babbles anything that comes into her mind, explaining so thoroughly (in the world of this movie, more than six words in a row is a monologue) that she is not a field agent that we know eventually she will have to shoot a gun at someone, and adding, as she swoons over X’s muscles, “It’s not that I have a safe word or anything; it’s kumquat.”

X-Men style, this Island of Lost Toys bunch of misfits keeps shifting loyalties, so, gets to fight and fight alongside , too. It’s all delightfully preposterous but crazy fun and .

Parents should know that this film includes constant action-style peril and violence, chases, explosions, assault weapons, knives, terrorism, sexual innuendo and non-explicit situation, and some strong language.

Family discussion: Do you agree with Xander’s comment about rebels and tyrants? How do the characters decide when to be loyal and who to be loyal to?

If you like this, try: the earlier “xXx” movies and the “Transporter” and “Fast and Furious” series

Snowden

Posted on September 15, 2016 at 5:51 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and some sexuality/nudity
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Tension and peril
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 16, 2016

Who better to take on the story of Edward Snowden than cinema-of-paranoia director Oliver Stone? Well, Laura Poitras, who directed the documentary about Snowden, “Citizenfour,” and who is portrayed in this film by Melissa Leo. As is usually the case, the documentary is the better film. But Stone’s narrative version, “Snowden,” is an absorbing version of the story, presenting vitally important issues in an arresting, provocative manner, with some superb moments. It is flawed, as Stone’s “historical” films tend to be, by unnecessary stacking of the deck that detracts from the credibility of the film. Stone does not trust the government, which is fine, but he doesn’t trust his audience, which is distracting. If you are going to make your hero a seeker of Truth, then Hollywood-izing the story is counter-productive.

The movie takes on three big questions, answers one, partially answers another, and turns the third over to us. The first question is: what happened? How did a 29-year-old computer guy get access to what appears to be the entire scope of US intelligence, copy it, and turn it over to reporters? Second, why did he do it? And third, is he a hero or a traitor?

Snowden was an enormously gifted, deeply patriotic young man who was in training for military special forces when an injury forced his return to civilian life. “There are other ways to serve your country,” the doctor crisply advises him. Naming Ayn Rand as one of his influences does not raise any concerns in his battery of entry tests and interviews, including lie detector tests. And so he goes to work for the CIA, NSA, and private contractors for both agencies, gaining access to the information and intrusions into personal data that are being constantly combed and mined for possible terrorist activity. Think of it as the government having Google that searches not just all public material but everything we think of as private: every email, every phone call, every bank account and credit card transaction, even invading your non-digital, analog world, including your home. According to this film, the government can spy on you Big Brother style via your webcam, even if the indicator light is off. I will wait here while you go get a Band-Aid to cover it up right now.

A combination of consciousness-raising from his left-leaning girlfriend (Shailene Woodley), horrifying discoveries of 4th Amendment violations, disturbing revelations about the military-industrial complex (from Nicolas Cage!), and disappointment in President Obama’s failure to curb these abuses leads Snowden to decide to go public. Briefly touched on are some other possible factors: the abuse of Tom Drake, who tried to raise these questions through official channels, and, possibly, some psychological or cognitive disturbance resulting from the onset of epilepsy and the drug used to treat it, or from the level of work-related stress that may have triggered the seizures. There is one “Beautiful Mind”-style scene where Snowden’s CIA boss (Rhys Ifans) speaks to him via a Skype-ish video conference, with a looming, room-size head along the lines of the Wizard of Oz. It is not clear whether this is Snowden’s subjective viewpoint or intended to be a realistic portrayal, but the conversation is, even within the framework of this film about massive intrusions into private lives of citizens with no suggestion of any inappropriate activity, preposterously paranoic.

All of this would be so much easier to take if Snowden was not heroic and brilliant every single moment. Given 5-8 hours to complete a programming test at the beginning of his tenure at the CIA, he finishes in under 40 minutes (38, he corrects his instructor), and everywhere he goes, he blows everyone away with his mad skills. As he zippily downloads the files he plans to turn over to the press (in real life it took months, not minutes), colleagues knowingly nod their approval, hard to understand given his insistence that he was careful to make it clear that he alone was responsible for the breach. Gordon-Levitt is, as ever, an enormously talented actor, but he is playing something of a cipher, a person with low affect. The endlessly skilled Melissa Leo is playing a tough and savvy journalist but as written she has little to do but gaze adoringly as she points her camera. The standouts in the cast are two of the most versatile and talented young actors working on film today: Ben Schnetzer and Lakeith Lee Stanfield as two of Snowden’s colleagues. In their brief screen time, each of them creates vivid, three-dimensional characters we instantly connect to more than we do to any of the main characters.

No matter where we place the balancing point between national security and individual freedom, we can all agree that the decisions should not be made unilaterally by individuals in their 20’s like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Snowden says he is hoping to start a conversation. I hope that the conversations about this film will be less about its failings and more about what we should do to make sure the next Snowden does not decide to take this step.

Parents should know that this film has very strong language, sexual references and situations and some nudity, tense and perilous situations, and issues of betrayal.

Family discussion: Is Snowden a hero or a traitor? What would you have done if you discovered the level of government surveillance? Who should decide and how much should be disclosed?

If you like this, try: “Zero Days” and “Citizenfour”

Jason Bourne

Posted on July 28, 2016 at 5:29 pm

Whoever thought that the “Fast and Furious” series would keep getting better while the once-smart “Bourne” series is the one that drives off a cliff?

During the boring parts of this movie, I played a game I made up that I called “Same or Different.” For example, in one of the earlier Bourne movies, our hero, the once-amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) grabbed a limited-use anonymous cell phone for a particularly clever maneuver. In this one, he grabs a small tracking device handily left out in a bowl like peanuts at a bar for happy hour. Same or different? Different because the first one was plausible and this one was ridiculous.

The earlier films had exceptionally well-staged fight scenes that felt like real people who get out of breath and hurt each other and jockey for advantage. In the first moments of this film, in addition to completely unnecessary jumps between five different locations around the world for no purpose, he knocks out an enormous professional fighter with one punch. Same or different? Same answer as above. And if we distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys by how much collateral damage they inflict on the world — how many innocent bystanders get killed, the answer here is more same than different.

There are franchise films made for fan service and then there are those that do not even service the fans, are merely a cash grab, and retroactively devalue the franchise.

This is a movie that asks us to believe that the head of the CIA and a Mark Zuckerberg-young titan of the world’s coolest social media company, a sort of cross between Google and Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat, decide to have a conversation of the utmost secrecy in a posh Washington DC restaurant, the kind where everyone eavesdrops on the big shots at the next table, especially reporters, politicians, and Hill staffers.

The first three Bourne films transcended the action/spy genre with a gritty, almost intimate feel far from the glossiness of James Bond, and with an expanding, deepening storyline that, as the then-LA Times critic Manohla Dargis said, began with the existential in “Identity” (Who am I?), extended to the moral in “Supremacy” (What did I do?). With the third film, the question of culpability extended to the larger “I” of the government: Who are we and what have we done? We will put aside for the moment the non-Bourne “Bourne,” which mistakenly went in the direction of a secret government program that was more “Captain America” than Bourne, with a mysterious ability-enhancing drug that removed the somber reality that resonated with the era of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib. There is plenty to explore and attempt to expiate now, and the movie tries to touch on contemporary issues explored in far more compelling — and terrifying — terms in documentaries like Alex Gibney’s “We Steal Secrets” and “Zero Days.” It just doesn’t do anything interesting with them while it is piling improbable motivations and preposterous situations almost as high as the carnage and wrecked cars.

Parents should know that this film has constant spy-related action-style peril and violence, many characters injured and killed including many innocent bystanders, themes of government corruption, and some strong language.

Family discussion: Who should decide the balance between privacy and security and how much information about those decisions should be public? What real-life events inspired this story?

If you like this, try: the other “Bourne” films and “Zero Days”

Related Tags:

Action/Adventure Series/Sequel Spies

Central Intelligence

Posted on June 16, 2016 at 5:22 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for crude and suggestive humor, some nudity, action violence and brief strong language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, scenes in bar
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended action-style violence, characters injured and killed, some disturbing images and sounds and torture
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	June 17, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	September 26, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01H4FJQ2G

There’s not much intelligence of any kind, central or otherwise, in this silly spy comedy, but what did you expect from a movie based on the sight gag of pairing man mountain former WWE star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson with pocket-sized pepperpot comic Kevin Hart? But its good-natured script by Ike Barinholtz, David Stassen, and director Rawson Marshall Thurber and the pleasure of watching the appealing stars enjoying themselves make it work.

Hart, something of a straight man for a change, plays Calvin, a one-time high school all-star voted Most Likely to Succeed, now an accountant working in a building with a huge inflated gorilla in front of it, and just passed over for promotion. He adores his wife, Maggie (“The Game’s” Danielle Nicolet), but is disappointed in himself. His wife wants him to go to couples therapy, but he is reluctant. “Black people don’t go to therapy. We go to the barbershop. Or we watch the movie ‘Barbershop.'”

Just before the 10th high school reunion he has refused to attend, he hears via Facebook from a classmate now known as Bob Stone (Johnson), who lists his “likes” as unicorns, cinnamon pancakes, and guns. In high school he was known as Robby. He was very overweight and awkward. Bullies grabbed him in the locker room shower and threw into the gym naked in front of the whole class. Calvin was the only one who was kind to him, handing him his letter jacket to cover up.

Now Bob is handsome and muscular, but not intimidating because he is wearing a unicorn t-shirt, a front-facing fannypack, and jorts. It seems all he wants from Calvin is a chance to thank him.

But then he punches out some bullies in the bar. He’s really good at it. And then he asks Calvin to help him with a “forensic accounting problem.” He asks to spend the night on Calvin’s fold-out couch (Maggie does not seem to be around). It’s a little weird, but then it gets scary. The next morning the CIA shows up because, according to Agent Pamela Harris (Amy Ryan, playing it very straight), Bob Stone is a traitor and a threat to national security who is about to deliver some very dangerous computer codes to the highest bidder.

All of this is just to set up a zany series of chases, shoot-outs, captures, and escapes, with a terrified Calvin trying to figure out who is telling the truth and stopping in the middle for many, many pop culture references, a marriage counseling session, and a visit to the ringleader of the guys who bullied Bob in high school (Jason Bateman).

The good spirits and anti-bullying message are sullied by some uncomfortably unkind “humor,” especially concerning a surprise cameo appearance that consists only of her being swept away by Johnson’s body and having crossed eyes. I’m pretty sure that punching a bully is not the message of empowerment that we should be getting here. But they’re no more serious about the message than they are about the storyline. This movie is about hanging out with Johnson and Hart as they goof on their own personas, and that is silly fun.

Parents should know that the film includes some comic nudity (bare tushes), potty humor, strong language, and extended action-style violence with torture and some disturbing sounds and images. Characters are injured and killed.

Family discussion: What is the best way to prevent bullying? Why didn’t Calvin achieve what he thought he would?

If you like this, try: “Spy” and the original “The In-Laws”