The Kingsman: The Golden Circle

First Hit:  Terrible story with few bright spots.

What a waste of talent. How do Julianne Moore (Poppy), Taron Egerton (Eggsy), Colin Firth (Harry Hart – whose character died in previous film), Channing Tatum (Tequila), Halle Berry (Ginger), Jeff Bridges (Champ) and Elton John (as himself) all sign up for a story that has disaster written all over it? I don’t know. Maybe the Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn script read better than it worked out to be. Maybe it was Vaughn’s issue because he couldn't deliver what he envisioned in his mind.

I just don’t know, how this happened. Besides a couple reasonable fight scenes and a couple slightly amusing tongue-in-cheek scenes, the premise that Poppy was going to blackmail the President of the United States so that she could freely sell her drugs all over the world, was preposterous.

Maybe the film needed to be WAY over the top in the tongue-in-cheek category to work.

Hart died in the previous film, and to make-up a story that he miraculously survived the shooting by some someone using a FEDEX  or UPS looking plastic bubble wrap around his head and followed by an emotional shock to make him be the same person as before is ludicrous.

Anyway, the Kingsman, who have a limited crew, with Merlin (Mark Strong), Eggsy and the partially defective Hart, are trying to find and destroy Charlie (Edward Holcroft) who makes an attempt to kill Eggsy. Charlie blows-up the country mansion and the tailor shop in London and now want Eggsy. Charlie being a shunned former Kingsman, unbeknownst to Eggsy, is really working for Poppy. Poppy is running her drug trade in a lost city in a jungle. She’s turned it into a 1950’s style base of operations. Really? This is the setup. Really, I kid you not.

Then the writers add this: For help, The Kingsman team up with the Statesman, which is run by Champ. The Statesman is the US version of the Kingsman; an independent spy security agency. It is run out of a distillery, hence the names of their agents, Tequila and Whiskey (Pedro Pascal). Now this is exciting! But wait, there's more...

Not only does Poppy build robotic dogs to protect herself, she likes being entertained, so she has hired Elton John to play songs for her in an empty theater anytime she likes. Elton does have a couple other key momentary appearances, but he’s not an actor and it shows.

Egerton is, at times, fun to watch but the script is so disjointed and unfounded that it lets him and the role down. Moore’s role is hopeless. She attempts to be part tongue-in-cheek and part serious, but because the role is ill defined in an ill-defined movie, it falls flat. Firth seems so out of place in this role it just made me cringe. He needed to stay dead. Strong was one bright spot in the film and his centered acting made his role work. Berry was driven to be so much less than what she is by the role. She's made to be a girl Friday and I disliked her scenes completely. Bridges' role was insipid. That he chose to act in this film is disheartening. Holcroft was good as the maniac bionic armed villain. He made it work. Pascal didn’t fit in this film at all. He seemed out of place and it was clear from the beginning, he wasn’t on the side he said he was on. Tatum was fun at times and it seemed as though he was used in this film as eye candy for a female audience. He added little to the story. John can stay away from acting, even as himself. Goldman and Vaughn script was a mess from the beginning to the end. Vaughn had no vision as a director to deliver a story that would engage the audience. The film was thrown at the audience.

Overall:  Don’t waste your time for this insipid film.

Miss Sloane

First Hit:  A very engaging and intense look at winner take all lobbying through a no-holds barred lobbyist.

I didn’t have any idea what kind of life or upbringing Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) had, but to witness her "win at any cost" actions made me wonder. As one of her bosses asked; “were you born this way?”

Notwithstanding, I bought Sloane’s character because all her actions supported it. Early on there’s a statement where she says something like; one must be fully prepared so that when your opponent plays their trump card, you play your trump card, trumping theirs.

One of the beginning sequences she’s asked by George Dupont (Sam Waterston), her high-powered boss at the large lobbyist firm she works in, to support the NRA in creating a program to get women to want to become gun owners to protect their family. They want this because the lobby wants the Brady gun law bill to be defeated in the Senate. Sloane balks, and when pressed by her boss to take the assignment, she quits and joins a small boutique firm run by Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong) to lobby for the Brady bill and against her old firm. When she leaves this firm she takes most of her staff except her primary aid Jane Malloy (Alison Pill), who says she's thinking of getting out of the lobby business.

The film flashes ahead where she is being held for illegal lobbying practices in a hearing chaired by Congressman Ron M. Sperling (John Lithgow). In these flash ahead scenes, we get a sense of the pressure a congressional hearing might bring against someone.

Likewise, we see how hard she works to find out material that she can use to make her point, win the votes. In befriending Esme Manucharian (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), one of the people on her team, she sees Esme’s intelligence and commitment to this cause but also exposes her secret to the public.

Does she care? That is one of the film’s points. There are many different levels of caring and it doesn’t always look like what most people expect it to be. To this end, when she sacrifices herself to win her cause and not involve others, some of these questions are answered.

Chastain is this film. Her characters intensity, focus, and work effort to deliver on made promises is absolutely amazing. A tour de force performance. Mbatha-Raw is fantastic. The unfolding vulnerability she shows as her past is revealed is totally believable. Pill is perfect as Sloane’s work partner. Strong is really good as the head of a boutique lobbying firm. His support and questioning of Sloane’s tactics was spot-on. Lithgow as the Congressman who gets compromised was very good. His pushiness and superior attitude falling away to shock at being found out, was sublime. Waterston was very good as the head of a lobbying firm that just wants his business to grow. Jonathan Perera wrote a very interesting script. It was a fascinating look at the lobbying industry. John Madden clearly guided Chastain to take charge of the character and this movie. This was an excellent idea.

Overall:  I was transfixed by Chastain’s character, which required complete commitment to her goals.

The Imitation Game

First Hit:  The amazing acting tells a truly amazing story about belief and perseverance.

This is the amazing story of how Germany’s Enigma machine was decoded and used to assist the allies in winning World War II.

Alan Turing is featured here as the father of machines that think (the way machines think/process information – today we call them computers). As a young boy Turing (young Alex play by Alex Lawther) is a smallish, nerd who is picked upon by his fellow classmates. He’s smart and begins to discover his homosexuality through caring about, of, and for his one true school friend – Christopher.

During the war he’s asked to participate in decoding the German Enigma machine. He’s grouped with Hugh (Matthew Goode), John (Allen Leech), Peter (Matthew Beard), Jack (James Northcote) and then Alan finds and adds Joan (Keira Knightley) to the team. Each of them are good puzzle solvers, chess players and/or mathematicians.

Problem with this team is that Turing (adult Turning played by Benedict Cumberbatch) doesn’t work well with others. He believes that he can build a machine that will solve the problem and thinks trying to decode Enigma manually is a useless endeavor. He thinks working with a team will slow him down.

This is an amazing story and the acting is top shelf. However, the problem I found with the film is that it tells this story in three different time frames and juggles them in a way that didn’t work for me. I was fascinated by the young Turing, and as I begin to fully drop into this child’s experience, bang we’re in the 1950’s and he’s being arrested for homosexuality, then bang we’re back into the story of him building a machine to decode Enigma.

All three stories are great and the acting in them is great – it is the jostling of my emotions that I didn’t like by the way it moved from one story to another. However, all told it was an amazingly acted film that told a wonderful and powerful story.

Lawther is absolutely mesmerizing as the young Turing. His expressions and soulful eyes told a huge story. Cumberbatch as the adult Turing is stunning and embodied a man who understood problems and math far more than people. I loved the scene where he stated that he was always decoding because people never said what the meant. Knightly is, again, sublime. She’s perfect as the only bright light in Turing’s relationships with people. Goode is very strong as the chess master who learns to respect what Turing can do. Leech, Beard and Northcote are great in their supporting roles as code solvers. Mark Strong as the MI6 manager of this team is cunningly strong. Charles Dance is perfect as Commander Denniston the man who wanted to run a tight ship. Graham Moore wrote a strong script but he and director Morten Tyldum could have, in my opinion, made a better film if it was more chronological in nature.

Overall:  This was an excellent film sharing an amazing story about how World War II was shortened.

Body of Lies

First Hit: For the most part I enjoyed this film because of the ideas behind it, but I couldn’t understand why or how the relationship between DiCaprio and Crowe developed.

This Ridley Scott directed story is, for the most part, compelling. There is intrigue with the subject of espionage and counter-espionage.

DiCaprio plays Ferris a young rising on-the-ground CIA operative in the Middle-East. He moves from country to country following a trail of terrorists looking for larger and larger high profile scores. We learn early on he is divorced although he wears a wedding ring.

His boss is Hoffman (played by Crowe) who is brash, detached from the process of killing people, and is hooked on technology typifies the perception of Americans by the world; uncaring for honor, the honor of the truth and the honor behind friendship.

At first there was a sense that none of the missions were connected and I sensed I was waiting for something (the plot) to happen. However, I soon figured out the plot was about DiCaprio finding his place in the world, a place to belong, a place where he cared about values other than the ones his boss represented.

Ferris finds this place when he starts working with Hani (played by Mark Strong) who is the “king” of Jordanian intelligence and Aisha (played by Golshifteh Farahani) a nurse who befriends him while treating him for rabies.

One puzzling part of this film was trying to understand the basis for Crowe’s and DiCaprio’s relationship and how it got the level of uncaring dramatized in the film. In other words some character development was missing. Scott did a great job of showing the technology we use to spy on people and kept it from being the focus of the film. The only issue, as already mentioned, we needed more character development.

Overall: I liked and was intrigued with this film and I liked the perspective it gave on how drone technology can and is used.