Action
The King's Man (15)
Review: Director Matthew Vaughn is nothing if not consistent. In 2014, he began his journey into Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons’ comic book The Secret Service with the gratuitously violent spy caper Kingsman: The Secret Service and traded enthusiastically in on-screen sadism and crude sexism. The 2017 sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, was another hyperkinetic exercise in gizmo-laden blandness with a scatter-brained plot salvaged by Elton John’s hilariously potty-mouthed and exaggerated self-portrait.
Originally intended for release in November 2019, the franchise’s third chapter wheezes and splutters as it sketches the origins of the covert organisation of impeccably-tailored British agents dedicated to global peace. Ralph Fiennes and Harris Dickinson replicate the suave mentor and headstrong protege dynamic of Colin Firth and Taron Egerton in previous films, precisely one century earlier as simmering tensions between first cousins King George V, Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany (played by Tom Hollander with contrasting moustaches) light a fuse on the First World War.
Vaughn’s penchant for overblown action sequences gets bogged down in the trenches but he achieves a thrilling crescendo with an expertly choreographed sword fight between Fiennes’ war veteran and Rhys Ifans’ sexually voracious Russian monk Rasputin, who whirls on a table top like a Cossack dancer as their blades clash. The script’s haphazard conflation of historical fact and wide-eyed lunacy, including some James Bond-style skulduggery with a Bakewell tart, is stodgy and – fittingly – hard to swallow.
The prequel opens with a tear-soaked prologue in 1902 South Africa as the Anglo-Boer conflict enters its final stretch. Distinguished war hero the Duke of Oxford (Fiennes) and wife Emily (Alexandra Maria Lara) visit a British Empire concentration camp run by high-ranking officer Kitchener (Charles Dance) as Red Cross envoys. A lone gunman opens fire and fatally wounds Emily. With her dying breath, she issues a decree about their five-year-old son Conrad (Alexander Shaw): “Protect him from this world. Never let him see war again…”
Twelve years later, the Duke is an ardent pacifist with a network of servant spies in influential households around the globe, coordinated by his housekeeper Polly (Gemma Arterton). When a shadowy mastermind called the Shepherd orders the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand (Ron Cook), the Duke rallies the troops including right-hand-man Shola (Djimon Hounsou). As storm cloud gather, the Duke clashes with his headstrong 17-year-old son (now played by Dickinson), who intends to enlist in the army.
The King’s Man elaborates on the series’ totems (codenames from Arthurian legend, the Savile Row tailor shop that becomes the group’s secret headquarters) with minimum dramatic outlay. Fiennes lends gravitas to his underwritten role while Vaugh concentrates on the spectacle, including a blast of Tchaikovsky’s bombastic 1812 Overture to accompany one frenetic bout of hand-to-hand fisticuffs.
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Action
The Matrix Resurrections (15)
Review: When Lana and Lilly Wachowski hardwired cinema audiences into The Matrix in 1999, the rush of blood to the head from “bullet time” was intoxicating. They supercharged a hyperkinetic style of filmmaking that was pillaged relentlessly by pop culture. The franchise suffered cardiac arrest with the bamboozling second chapter, The Matrix Reloaded, then flatlined a few months later in 2003 with the tortuous conclusion The Matrix Revolutions.
Contrary to its promising title, The Matrix Resurrections turns off life support and unplugs itself at the mains, reuniting principal cast members Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss for a nonsensical and nostalgic exercise in chest-puffing self-aggrandisement. A blitzkrieg of old footage nods and winks at an art-imitating-life-imitating-art conceit that invites one character to verbally reference “our beloved parent company Warner Bros” and another to exit limply from the fray with the sign-off “This is not over. I will see you in a franchise spin-off”. If box office takings are brisk, I fear their threat may be prophetic rather than pathetic.
Directed solely by Lana, the fourth picture has a dongle wedged so far up its USB port that it fails to realise the only people laughing at the in-jokes are on screen. Action sequences are breathlessly choreographed, recycling key motifs including bullet casings tumbling in slow motion, but a night-time car chase fails its MOT and looks strikingly similar to the zombified automotive carnage in South Korean horror sequel Train To Busan Presents: Peninsula.
If seeing is believing then Thomas Anderson (Reeves) is now an award-winning designer of The Matrix video game trilogy. Based in San Francisco at the company he co-owns with business partner Smith (Jonathan Groff), Thomas makes regular visits to a kindly therapist (Neil Patrick Harris) after a failed suicide bid and blithely swallows prescribed blue pills to calm the voices in his head. “Don’t make this film Keanu,” they mouth. Unheeded. When a renegade operative called Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and a new iteration of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) persuade Thomas to pop a red pill, humanity’s saviour takes another tumble down the rabbit hole with a motorcycle enthusiast called Tiffany (Moss).
The Matrix Resurrections is too meta to matter beyond the curiosity value of Reeves and Moss, both in their fabulous 50s, defying gravity again in sunglasses and billowing trench coats. Regrettably, they share insufficient screen time to rekindle molten screen chemistry while Abdul-Mateen II is a lacklustre substitute for Laurence Fishburne’s theatricality. Henwick is a spunky if woefully underwritten addition.
At the end of The Matrix Revolutions, exiled program Sati asked the Oracle if they would ever see messianic Neo again after his self-sacrifice in Machine City. “I suspect so, some day,” intoned the sage. For once, I wish she was wrong.
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Drama
The Tragedy Of Macbeth (15)
Review: Since 1982 when production began on the blackly humorous low-budget crime thriller Blood Simple, Joel Coen has been creatively linked at the hip with his brother Ethan, sharing credits as directors, screenwriters and editors (under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes). The siblings collected Oscars for their lip-smackingly macabre screenplay to Fargo, which also garnered Joel’s wife Frances McDormand her first win as Best Actress, then added to their haul in 2008 with three golden statuettes for No Country For Old Men including Best Picture and Best Achievement In Directing.
For this stripped-back adaptation of the Scottish play, Joel flies solo for the first time. Working closely with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, he delivers a stark, haunting interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays, shot in crisp black and white on sound stages in a claustrophobic square aspect ratio that heightens the emotional suffocation. Production designer Stefan Dechant’s imposing, angular sets work in queasy harmony with Coen’s truncated version of the text, constructing seemingly endless stone staircases and vertigo-inducing corridors to sow seeds of insanity as Macbeth delivers his soliloquy (“Is this a dagger which I see before me..?”)
Casting an imperious Denzel Washington in the title role and McDormand as his conniving spouse refracts bloodthirsty ambition through a lens of two childless sixty-somethings teased with the possibility of finally seizing power after so many years on the periphery. Their desperation is palpable. It is now or never.
Impatient to realise the witches’ prophecy that he will be anointed Thane of Cawdor and then “king hereafter”, Macbeth (Washington) and his wife (McDormand) murder King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson) and frame the royal chamberlains. Rightful heirs Malcolm (Harry Melling) and Donalbain (Matt Helm) flee, fearful they may be next, and a vengeful Macduff (Corey Hawkins) clashes blades with the newly crowned king as Birnam Wood comes to life.
With a running time of just 105 minutes, The Tragedy Of Macbeth loses slightly too much dramatic meat from supporting characters but some of Coen’s choices reap rewards, like his expansion of slippery nobleman Ross (Alex Hassell). In 2015, Australian director Justin Kurzel ramped up the carnage in his take on Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, shot on weather-ravaged location in England and Scotland.
Coen shows greater restraint when it comes to spilling blood on screen but the horror is just as compelling, particularly when celebrated stage performer Hunter casts a spell as the witches. Her porcelain limbs contort and twist as furiously as her words, delivered as a sonorous rasp akin to a death rattle. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes,” she caws as crows wheel overhead. Indeed it does.
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