Matthew Vaughn

Argylle

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  • Title: Argylle
  • IMDb: link

Argylle

Argylle is bonkers. The latest from director Matthew Vaughn, in his collaboration with screenwriter Jason Fuchs, contains more than a little Kingsman DNA in an over-the-top tale of a best-selling author who discovers the characters and stories she has been writing about are real. As a one-time experience, Argylle may be worth a viewing. As a film, the over-the-top tone is inconsistent for both the serious and comedic sequences it is constantly applied to. When the film leans into its inherent goofiness ratcheting up to levels that make Kingsman: The Secret Service look like a spy documentary, Argylle can be fun, but when it attempts to be serious about a story we simply can not take seriously the entire movie grinds to a screeching halt.

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The King’s Man

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  • Title: The King’s Man
  • IMDb: link

Removing all the humor, and most of the over-the-top action, from the franchise, writer/director Matthew Vaughn delivers the dreary prequel The King’s Man. Set during World War I, the film isn’t about the creation of the Kingsman but instead the story of the man (Ralph Fiennes) who would eventually put the group together and his turbulent relationship to his son (Harris Dickinson). As in the other films, there is, of course, a secret organization led by a Scottish madman behind the events of WWI whose reveal turns out to be as lame as the rest of the film.

I can only assume that such an ill-conceived project was the result of a bet that Vaughn couldn’t create a Kingsman film as a drama. Turns out he can, just not a good one. Gemma Arterton steals one nice moment as the maid turned super-spy, the rest is entirely forgettable. What a waste of time for an increasingly irrelevant franchise.

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Kingsman: The Golden Circle

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  • Title: Kingsman: The Golden Circle
  • IMDb: link

Kingsman: The Golden Circle movie reviewWhile I enjoyed writer-director Matthew Vaughn‘s absurdly over-the-top (but not that original) Bond spoof, I was far from the biggest fan of Kingsman: The Secret Service. Two years later Vaughn returns with most of the key figures from the first film offering more of the same while widening the world and opening the franchise to new sequel opportunities. The script follows the still unfortunately-named Eggsy (Taron Egerton) as one of the few surviving members of Kingsman which is destroyed by a crazy drug kingpin (Julianne Moore) who has a failed Kingsman recruit (Edward Holcroft) on her payroll.

While the film lacks the big action sequences of the first film or a strong female character to root for – Hanna Alström returns as Princess Tilde but is of little importance to the plot and Roxy (Sophie Cookson) is unfortunately given the extremely early exit I predicted – the sequel hits most of the same beats as the original with a crazy villain with an insane plan and absurd sidekick which Eggsy and friends will have to thwart to save a large percentage of the world’s population. To do that he’ll need the help of some new American friends.

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Kingsman: The Secret Service

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Kingsman: The Secret Service
  • IMDb: link

Kingsman: The Secret ServiceKingsman: The Secret Service isn’t the first time director Matthew Vaughn has signed on to bring a Mark Millar comic to the big screen. Like Kick-Ass, Kingsman: The Secret Service centers on the life of a young punk who enters a world of violence, ridiculous adventures, and even more ridiculous villains. This time, however, the subject of spies rather than comic book heroes is both celebrated and lampooned.

Based on Millar’s comic The Secret Service, Taron Egerton stars as a working class kid from a bad neighborhood raised by a single mother after his father died in mysterious circumstances working for a secret organization of spies (and tailors?) known as Kingsman. Recruited by the same agent (Colin Firth) who recruited his father, Egsy spends most of the film proving himself against other candidates (Sophie Cookson, Edward Holcroft, Nicholas Banks, Tom Prior, Fiona Hampton) working to take the place of the latest Kingsman (Jack Davenport) who died investigating a link between a kidnapped professor (Mark Hamill) and an eccentric billionaire known as Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) who has some extreme ideas about lowering the population of the Earth.

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The Debt

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  • Title: The Debt
  • IMDB: link

the-debt-blu-raySecrets always come out. When a former Mossad agent (Ciarán Hinds) is killed on the eve of the release of a book glorifying the events that made him and two others national heroes, Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) is forced to face the past and weigh the consequences of telling the truth after so many years.

Most of The Debt takes place in Cold War flashbacks as Mossad agents Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain), David Peretz (Sam Worthington), and Stefan Gold (Marton Csokas), are chosen to kidnap a Nazi scientist known as “The Surgeon of Birkenau” (Jesper Christensen), and smuggle him out of East Berlin for trial in Israel.

When the escape plan is compromised the three agents are forced to sit on the Nazi for days, as tensions fray, until a new plan can be devised. Eventually the doctor is shot by Rachel while trying to escape. At least that’s what history records.

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