Royal Academy of Dramatic Art trained actor Taron Egerton is best known as Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin, the rebellious teenager turned super spy of Kingsman: The Secret Service.
That film plays like a violent My Fair Lady, taking a guy from the wrong side of the tracks and transforming him into a Kingsman Tailor, a super spy with manners that would make Henry Higgins proud and gadgets that James Bond would envy.
The Kingsman Tailors are the modern day knights; their finely tailored suits their armour. In the first movie Eggsy made it through “the most dangerous job interview in the world.” This weekend he returns to the glamorous and dangerous 007ish world of intrigue in a sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle.
It may be the role that made him a star, but don’t expect Egerton to revisit Eggsy time-after-time. “I’m trying to play parts which are a little more out there,” he says, “but I want variety.”
His IMDB page reveals the width and breadth of the variety he seeks in his movie career. From Legend’s psychopathic English gangster “Mad” Teddy Smith and Johnny, the soulful singing gorilla of Sing to American Ponzi schemer Dean Karny in the upcoming Billionaire Boy’s Club and the title role in Robin Hood, it’s obvious he’s trying to shake things up.
“I want to have fun,” he says. “I’m not interested in being a serious actor, because I think it’s boring, and I think we’ve got plenty of them.”
Here are a couple of his performances you may have missed that showcase what a serious actor he really is.
In Testament of Youth he co-stars opposite Alicia Vikander in a retelling of the classic World War I memoir by Vera Brittain. She plays Brittain, a tenacious young woman whose schooling is interrupted when WWI breaks out and brother Edward (Egerton), her fiancé Roland (Kit Game of Thrones Harington) and friends Victor (Colin Morgan) and Geoffrey (Jonathan Bailey) are sent to fight at the front lines. Vera opts to join them, leaving school to enrol as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment.
Egerton‘s role is small but important. As Edward he convinces their father to allow Vera to sit for the entrance exam and later, when he is killed on the Italian Front, his passing teaches his sister about personal loss and the futility of war. It’s a sensitive and spirited performance that showcases his on screen charisma.
Egerton is looser-limbed as the title character in Eddie the Eagle. He plays the English skier whose ambitions to compete in the Olympics made him a worldwide star. Like his character, the film sets its sights high. It’s not content to simply be a feel good film, it’s aspiring to be a feel GREAT movie.
Egerton, hams it up, handing in a performance that makes Benny Hill look nuanced. With thick, ill-fitting glasses, he’s all doe eyes and determination, a stiff-upper-lipper who wants to be part of the Olympics to prove everyone who told him he wasn’t good enough wrong. It’s an underdog story of such epic proportions it makes The Bad News Bears and all other underdogs look jaded by comparison.
“I don’t want to look back at my career and see a string of incredibly commercial projects that don’t have much heart,” he says. “I’m looking for things that have soul.”
The first “Kingsman” movie, “The Secret Service,” was like a violent “Pygmalion,” taking a guy from the wrong side of the tracks and transforming him into a Kingsman Tailor, a super spy with manners that would make Henry Higgins proud and gadgets that James Bond would envy.
The Kingsman Tailors are the modern day knights; their finely tailored suits their armour. In the first movie rebellious teenager turned super spy Gary “Eggsy” Unwin (Taron Egerton) made it through “the most dangerous job interview in the world” to earn a place in the exclusive group. This weekend he returns to the glamorous and treacherous 007ish world of intrigue in a sequel, “The Golden Circle.”
The job of keeping the world safe is the international intelligence agency Kingman’s top priority. That, and looking sharp while doing it. On the eve of Eggsy’s big date with girlfriend Princess Tilde (Hanna Alström) he is attacked by Charlie Hesketh (Edward Holcroft), a rejected Kingsman applicant turned bad. One of the only survivors of the exploding head caper of the last film, Hesketh only has one arm. The other is a mechanical unit called Armageddon—Get it?—equipped with all manner of gadgets, including a hacking device that taps into Eggsy’s Kingsman database.
Turns out, Charlie is working with the Golden Circle, the world’s biggest drug cartel. CEO—and possible cannibal—Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore) is not content to have a global monopoly on the drug trade. She wants recognition for her achievements. To this end she plans to hold the world hostage by shipping millions of pounds of drugs poisoned with a chemical that will cause the Blue Rash. First symptom? Blue spider veins. Next? Mania, then paralysis followed by exploding organs. She wants the war on drugs to end immediately or she will let all the folks who have used her tainted drugs die horrible deaths. Her slogan? “Save Lives! Legalize!”
Her first step is to use the information from Charlie’s arm to locate all ten Kingsman offices worldwide and blow them all to kingdom come. Only Eggsy and Merlin (Mark Strong) survive the coordinated blasts. Stiff upper lipped, they continue on and, following Kingsman protocol, will later shed a single tear in private for their fallen comrades. With their ranks decimated the duo turns to their American counterparts. Camouflaged as a whiskey manufacturer in Kentucky the Statesman are run by a colourful character known as Agent Champagne (Jeff Bridges).
Former rodeo clown Agents Tequila (Channing Tatum) and Whiskey (Pedro Pascal) are six-shooter toting modern cowboys, stereotypical slices of Americana for a new generation while Agent Ginger Ale (Halle Berry) provides high tech guidance. Along with the new partners Merlin and Eggsy also discover their old friend Harry Hart (Colin Firth), a legendary Kingsman left for dead on an old mission. Unbeknownst to them he was rescued by the Statesman but now suffers from retrograde amnesia. Can Harry’s old friends help reboot his Kingsman memories? Will the surviving Kingsman and Statesmen be able to put aside their cultural differences in time to bring law and order back to the world?
There is a fun ninety-minute movie contained within “The Golden Circle,” but unfortunately it is buffered with an additional fifty minutes of talking. Sure, there are gadgets galore, wild chases and plenty of fight scenes but it suffers from a Pierce Brosnan era James Bond love of gadgetry and silly action set pieces. If the clichés don’t get you—“The Kingsmen need you,” Eggsy emotes, hoping to jog Harry’s memories. “The world needs you. I need you to.”—the sluggish pacing will. Despite the frenetic piece of the action sequences most other scenes drag, elongated with needless nattering. Even a riff on the first film’s most famous scene, the pub fight, feels overdone and uninspired.
The joie de vivre that made the first film so startling and fun is missing. Even the soundtrack has a been there, heard it before flavour. A case in point? The use of John Denver’s “Country Road” in a major scene despite the song already being used this year in “Free Fire,” “Alien: Covenant,” “Okja” and “Logan Lucky.”
“Kingsman: The Golden Circle” is star studded but is so enamoured of its own style it doesn’t give anyone a chance to be interesting. Any movie whose most memorable performance comes from Elton John—who is clearly a better piano player than actor—is in trouble. The clothes are nice but style isn’t enough to dress up this poor excuse for a caper film.
“X-Men: Days of Future Past” offers up two for the price of one.
Merging the young versions of Magneto and Professor X with their older counterparts is a cool idea, and certainly gives the movie a boost in the marquee department, but I felt the old timers were left with their own heightened sense of drama and not much else. It seems a shame to have McKellen and Stewart, the Martin and Lewis of mutants, on screen together and not give them much to do.
Based on a 1981 two-issue special of the X-Men comic series the new film begins in a post-apocalyptic future. “A dark and desolate world,” according to the narration. “A world of war, suffering and loss on both sides—mutants and the humans who tried to help them.”
The causing all the trouble are indestructible robot warriors called Sentinels. Able to adapt to any mutant power they’ve created chaos for the mutant race, bringing them to the edge of extinction.
In an effort to “change their fate” long time enemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) team up with Storm (Halle Berry), Blink (Fan Bingbing), Bishop (Omar Sy) and use Kitty Pryde’s (Ellen Page) teleportation ability to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to change history and prevent the creation of the murderous automations. His first task is to convince the 1973 versions of Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and young Professor X (James McAvoy) that they are stronger together than apart.
The only things larger than the movie’s lengthy list of stars are the big ideas contained within. Wrapped around a simple time travel story—the kind of thing “Family Guy” does once or twice a season—are timeless ideas about racism, tolerance, war and rebellion. Not usually the stuff of summer blockbusters, but the X-Men franchise has always been a bit brainier than most. At times it’s a bit too ponderous, but I’ll take that over the flash-and-trash of most CGI epics.
Not that it’s a total head trip. It’s a movie about time travel, mutants and serious actors like Michael Fassbender saying lines like, “We received a message from the future,” so, of course, it’s a little preposterous. That’s part of the fun. It plays with the conventions of big time summer entertainment—check out the spectacular time-shredding sequence featuring the lightening-fast mutant Quicksilver (Evan Peters) that’s both eye-popping and cheeky—but tempers the bombastic stuff with thought provoking notions.
In fact, it could be argued that the ideas are the stars of the film. Jennifer Lawrence is the a-listiest actress in Hollywood right now, but in her second outing as Mystique she almost gets cut adrift in a sea of characters. Ditto Peter Dinklage as the closest thing the film has to a villain.
They’re all good, but Magneto, Professor and Wolverine are complex, cool characters that bring the film’s themes to life; all the rest is set dressing, except for the Quicksilver scene. That was like The Matrix without Keanu’s hangdog expression.
SYNOPSIS: Based on a 1981 two-issue special of the X-Men comic series the new film begins in a post-apocalyptic future. Menacing robot warriors called Sentinels have created chaos for the mutant race, bringing them to the edge of extinction. To combat the threat long time enemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) team up with Storm (Halle Berry), Blink (Fan Bingbing), Bishop (Omar Sy) and use Kitty Pryde’s (Ellen Page) teleportation ability to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to change history and prevent the creation of the murderous automations. His first task is to convince the 1970s versions of Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and young Professor X (James McAvoy) that they are stronger together than apart.
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 4 Stars
Mark: 4 Stars
Richard: Mark, Days of Future Past offers up two for the price of one. Merging the young versions of Magneto and Professor X with their older counterparts is a cool idea, and certainly gives the movie a boost in the marquee department, but I felt the old timers were left with their own heightened sense of drama and not much else. It seems a shame to have McKellen and Stewart, the Martin and Lewis of mutants, on screen together and not give them much to do. What did you think?
Mark: This installment really belongs to McAvoy, Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender. I didn’t care for the “future” plot with the fogey mutants, but I thought the movie snapped to attention when it flashed back to 1973. The sense of time and place seemed very authentic; in one scene Lawrence is dressed exactly like Carly Simon on the cover of her third album. I half expected her to launch into a rendition of “You’re So Vain” at Fassbender. There’s some interesting historical revisionism revolving around JFK and Nixon that even conspiracy theorists would find preposterous-more X-Files than X-Men—but I appreciated the creative effort.
RC: It’s a movie about time travel, mutants and serious actors like Michael Fassbender saying lines like, “We received a message from the future,” so, of course, it’s a little preposterous, but wrapped up in the time bending plot are some interesting ideas about racism, tolerance, war and rebellion. Not usually the stuff of summer blockbusters, but the X-Men franchise has always been a bit brainier than most. At times it’s a bit too ponderous, but I’ll take that over the flash-and-trash of most CGI epics.
MB: Me too. I like the franchise for its superior acting, plotting, and its whiff of Ayn Rand objectivism. But it’s got a sense of humour too, which is rarely found in these epics. There’s a fantastic scene in this movie where Evan Peters as the young Quicksilver, who can move faster than human time, rearranges an entire tableau of bad guys so they wind up hurting themselves instead of our heroes. But he does it with such juvenile glee that it captures the joy of being a powerful mutant and an adolescent prankster. And casting height-challenged Peter Dinklage to play a scientist out to destroy the “outsiders” is brilliantly ironic.
RC: The actors are all good, but I would argue that the real stars of the film are the ideas. Magneto, Professor and Wolverine are all complex, cool characters that bring the film’s themes to life; all the rest is set dressing, except for the Quicksilver scene you mentioned. That was like The Matrix without Keanu’s hangdog expression.
MB: Oh, and just a warning, Richard. When I googled the film there was a link to a movie called XXX Men. Do NOT click on this link!
“New Year’s Eve” isn’t so much a movie as it is a cavalcade of familiar names in situations geared to make you understand why everybody hates December 31st.
This mishmash of easy sentiment, romance, illness, musical numbers, product placement—Disaronno anyone?—tradition and a version of “I Can’t Turn You Loose” that makes the kids from Glee sound like Otis Redding, flip flops from story to story so often it’s like a five-year-old grabbed the remote and is wildly channel surfing.
There’s Robert De Niro as a terminally ill man; Halle Berry as his kindly nurse. Then there’s Michelle Pfeiffer as a dowdy “executive secretary who decides to tackle her unfulfilled resolutions,” and Zac Efron as the courier who makes her reams come true. Hillary Swank is the acrophobic producer of the Times Square New Year’s Eve show, Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi are a caterer and a rock star with a romantic history, Ashton Kutcher as a curmudgeonly cartoonist who gets trapped in an elevator with back-up singer Lea Michelle and even Ryan Seacrest pops up playing—who else?—himself.
Have I left anyone out? Probably, there are more stars here than in the heavens, but rest assured, by the end of the movie stories have woven together and no hearts are broken.
Like its predecessor “Valentine’s Day'” “New Year’s Eve” takes a bunch of stars with little or no box office cache on their own—Zac Efron, Jessica Biel—and packages them into one large, over-stuffed package that somehow, in terms of star power, is bigger than the sum of its parts. To quote the movie, “there’s more celebrities here than rehab.”
Too bad they are wasted in a movie that is little more than a collection of clichés salvaged from every romantic comedy, Hallmark holiday special and sitcom you’ve ever seen. From its generic opening song played over generic shots of New York City, every moment of “New Year’s Eve” inspires déjà vu, the feeling of been there and done that.
There are Walmart commercials with more real emotion than director Gary Marshall manages to bring to this manipulative mess. His idea of romance is Josh Duhamel doing the rom com run through the streets of New York as the ball drops in Times Square. His idea of humor is old people saying inappropriate things and by the time Mayor Bloomberg kicks off the New Year’s Eve countdown with the words, “Let’s drop the ball,” its already abundantly clear that Marshall already dropped the ball with this movie.
Somewhere in Hollywood there is a very usual script. I say usual because it doesn’t look like all the other scripts that get made into movies every year. This one looks more like the “fill-in-the-blanks” game that you used to play as a kid.
The first line probably looks like this:
A beautiful / handsome ____________, played by _____________, risks his / her life to investigate a ___________’s murder.
Fill in the blanks anyway you like, and presto! you have a standard “Mad Libs” thriller that will make a few bucks at the multi-plex on opening weekend before heading straight to the DVD bargain bin.
Ashley Judd used to make a lot of these kinds of fill-in-the-blanks thrillers. Remember Double Jeopardy? Eye of the Beholder? No, neither do I, and that’s because they are so generic they make almost no impression on the viewer. Such is the problem with the Perfect Stranger, a new that seems to have borrowed the “Mad Libs” crime drama script template.
In Perfect Stranger a beautiful reporter, played by Halle Berry, risks her life to investigate a friend’s murder. So far, so standard. The addition of a couple of quirky characters should spice things up a bit, yes? Well, no. Giovanni Ribisi as a wacky computer genius and Bruce Willis as a two-timing advertising executive are both so by-the-book even the receptionist at Central Casting would think they were old hat.
There are plot twists a plenty, (no, Balki isn’t the killer, that was Perfect Strangers), but they feel like contrivances created by a desperate screenwriter rather than events that grew organically from the story. The twists and turns aren’t interesting, and when it is time for someone to go to jail (I won’t say who just in case you decide to throw your money away on this one) the evidence against them is so thin it wouldn’t even warrant a slap on the wrist at the People’s Court.
Perfect Stranger promises much, but delivers little. It’s a total _________ of _________.
Words like audacious and ambitious will be used to describe the sprawling three hour saga from co-directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer. Based on a novel by British author David Mitchell, it’s a non-linear epic that connects six characters—make that souls—throughout different times in history. It is audacious and ambitious, and all those other “a” words, but I’d add another word to the mix—baffling.
Careening through history like a time machine with a broken steering wheel, the movie jumps from the Pacific Islands circa 1849 to 1973 San Francisco, to Cambridge and London in the 1930s and present day to Neo Seoul in 2144 to a time known as 106 years after the Big Fall.
The structure seems random at first, but as the running time ticks on connections begin to assert themselves and through lines emerge. Each story has a distinct look and feel—Neo Seoul is futuristic, present day London is pitched almost like Benny Hill meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—but share a common cast. Each actor plays many characters—to stop your mind from wandering you may find yourself playing a Where’s Waldo game, trying to identify the actors in their various guises.
Genders are bent and ethnicity skewed to make the point that each of these people are connected, their souls passed form one time frame to another. It’s as if we’re watching a history (and future) of civilization seen through a handful of people. “Our lives are not our own,” the film tells us, “we are bound to each other from womb to tomb.” In other words these characters are replaying their lives throughout eternity, raising questions of fate versus destiny.
It’s heady stuff, much of it, but while there are loads of ideas on display, only one is hammered home. The idea that we are all connected, while spiritually satisfying, is the most simplistic of the movie’s concepts. We get it in the first hour, it’s reinforced in the second and by the end of the third act you want to scream, “I know! I know! We’re all connected!”
It’s heavy handed concept wise, but there is much to enjoy here. The performances are strong. They have to be to battle with the nonlinear structure that sees these stories seemingly randomly cut and pasted together as the trio of directors slowly connect the story’s dots.
It’s a pleasure to see actors like Tom Hanks, Jim Broadbent and Hugo Weaving push their boundaries. Hanks takes on multiple characters with fake teeth, fake hair and in one case, even a really fake accent.
The action scenes, however, are a let down. Surprisingly for directors who redefined movie action in their “Matrix” trilogy, the anticipated Wachowskis touch is missing in the bigger set pieces.
“Cloud Atlas” is a sincere attempt to bring a difficult novel to the screen, and even though the filmmakers include a scene where a critic is thrown off a balcony to his death, literally exploding in a gory gusher, I have to admire it’s scope, if not it’s execution.
SYNOPSIS: Words like audacious and ambitious will be used to describe the sprawling three hour saga from co-directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer. Based on a novel by British author David Mitchell, the story careens through history like a time machine with a broken steering wheel. Jumping from the Pacific Islands circa 1849 to 1973 San Francisco, to Cambridge and London in the 1930s and present day to Neo Seoul in 2144 to a time known as 106 years after the Big Fall it’s a non-linear epic that connects six characters—make that souls—throughout different times in history.
Star Ratings:
Richard: 3 ½ (Interconnected) Stars
Mark: 4 Stars
Richard: Mark, the movie’s structure seems random at first, but as the running time ticks on connections begin to assert themselves and through lines emerge. Each story has a distinct look and feel but share a common cast. Each actor plays many characters—so to stop your mind from wandering you may find yourself playing a Where’s Waldo game, trying to identify the actors in their various guises. Did you find it confusing?
Mark: All part of the game, Richard, all part of the game. And the Wachowskis are nothing if not game players. There are some people who will think this is the best movie of the year. I don’t know about that but it is the MOST movie of the year-eight movies by my count. Usually after I see a film I want to go for coffee- after Cloud Atlas I felt I needed a vacation. But you can’t fault its ambition. What you can question is its spiritual balderdash of We Are All Connected. If so, why won’t Spielberg return my calls?
RC: I hear you, it is a whole lotta movie. I also get what you mean about he idea that we are all connected. While spiritually satisfying, is the most simplistic of the movie’s concepts. We get it in the first hour, it’s reinforced in the second and by the end of the third act you want to scream, “I know! I know! We’re all connected!” What did you think about each actor taking on six roles?
MB: Part of the fun, and an Oscar shoo-in for whoever did the makeup. There is another theme to the movie which I found less trite which is humanity’s pursuit of freedom and free will over the ages. Some of the stories make this point better than others; I was most engrossed in the Seoul 2144 plot and least impressed with the nursing home geezers, although Jim Broadbent was terrific, as always. But I found it kind of depressing to find that in the far, far future, we all talk like Ozark hillbillies.
RC: I liked the nursing home story! But then again Benny Hill always made me laugh. The action scenes, however, let me down. Surprisingly for directors who redefined movie action in their Matrix trilogy, the anticipated Wachowskis touch is missing in the bigger set pieces.
MB: I think if the action scenes were any bigger they might have overwhelmed the rest of the movie. But even if the film had one plot too many and one idea too few, it still made me feel the grandeur of what cinema can be.
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
