Kingsman: The Secret Service (Matthew Vaughan, 2014)

Whatever you think of Kingsman you’ve got to applaud Matthew Vaughan. This is a man who turned down directing X-Men: Days of Future Past after he made the excellent X-Men: First Class, to follow a passion product, backed by his own money. He swapped a budget of $200 million + for the meagre (by Hollywood standards) $80 million, and filming in the UK. With this, Stardust and Kick-Ass, Vaughan is becoming a one-man UK film industry. And if his films are as much fun as this, long may he continue.

Vaughan has made a film for anyone who has an inner 15 year old Lad. Admittedly this won’t be for everyone, but I do have an inner 15 year old and by the end of the film he was beaming in joy. It’s a film that wears its influences on its sleeves – taking obvious inspiration from the 60 Spy Craze – but manages to spin them into a modern context, being both fresh and familiar at the same time.  Key to this is the chemistry between Colin Firth (clearly having a whale of a time as a fine-tailored bad-ass) and new-comer Taron Egerton who sells the main character’s transition from council estate reprobate to international spy. The action, like Kick-Ass, happily eschews the bloodless approach of so many Hollywood action films of recent years, and gleefully throws a healthy bag of Ultra-Violence at the audience. In one delirious scene Firth goes bat-shit crazy in a church, throwing aside his King’s Speech stuffyness. Good support comes from Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Strong (not a bad-guy for once) with Mark Hamill and Michael Caine cameoing. It’s also the first film I’ve seen in a long time that doesn’t try to wedge in an artificial romance between the hero and a fellow lady–spy (Sophie Cookson) allowing her character to contribute to the action and story on her own terms, rather than as a romantic adjunct.

Your reaction will depend greatly on your love of swearing, OTT action and anal-sex jokes. If, like me, there’s a part of you that wants to cast off the trappings of being a responsible adult and indulge a more puerile side you’ll have fun. If not, try something else. Still I can’t help but smile at the unsuspecting audience members who might wander in because that nice Mr Firth headlines the cast…

Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980)

Spoilers!

I’ve never really got Brian De Palma. Of all the movie brats (Spielberg, Coppola, etc) he’s the one I’ve engaged with least, and he’s probably the least respectable in critical circles. Post The Untouchables  (1987) he became more mainstream, hitting blockbuster heights with Mission: Impossible (1996) but has tailed off since, with his most recent films gaining less attention and smaller releases. Maybe mainstream success was the end of him because Dressed to Kill is far more interesting than his blockbusters, reveling in sleaze and controversy, but also showing how good De Palma can be.

When released in 1980 Dressed to Kill was widely condemned by feminists and gay rights groups for its depiction of violence and transsexualism. All the women are subjected to serious violence and terror. Sexual difference was linked to violence. However 24 years distance and the film takes on a very different light, one in which men are repeatedly exposed and condemned. If anything this film shows us how women’s desire is continuously repressed and negated by society.

The opening of the film would be unheard of today, a long lingering set of shots on Angie Dickinson (49 at the time) in the shower fantasizing. It’s a moment that simultaneously acknowledges female desire, and suggests that women over 40 can be attractive and have a sex drive. In the cinema culture of today, where actresses are getting younger and disposed of by age 40, this seems unfathomable. It is alas all a dream for Angie, and the film cuts abruptly to the “wham, bam, thank-you ma’am” sexual practice of her husband. Angie fakes it, but her discontent is obvious to us. She visits her shrink, Michael Caine, and confesses her need to be desired. What follows is a wonderful, dreamlike, sequence in an art gallery where Angie pursues a man, and is pursued by him. The camera drifts along the corridor tracking her excitement and fear, as she follows him, and is followed. An amazing scene happens, again one that I can’t imagine would occur in today’s Hollywood, in which the man goes down on Angie in the back of a cab. The whole sequence, from gallery to cab, focuses on her pleasure and desire, and shows sex as something other than a penetrative act.

She awakes, happy. It can’t last of course. She discovers the man has VD and as she flies a woman brutally murders her in an elevator, with a cut-throat razor no-less. Here the film switches to Nancy Allen, a “Park-Avenue Whore”, who witnesses the murder (and whose John scarpers at the first sight of blood). As Nancy becomes a target, Michael Caine starts getting threatening answer-phone messages from a trans-gender patient and the plot deepens.

I can see where the critics came from in 1980, decrying the fact that the sex in the film is linked to violence and violation, and that in a world where the trans-community was struggling with it’s representation the inclusion of a possible trans-killer was not helpful. But today the film reads more as a critique of men, with both women used and attacked repeatedly. In a patriarchal world what other punishment for daring to embrace one’s sexual desire could there be for a women other than disease and death? The heroine, Nancy Allen, is blackmailed by the sleazy cop (a young Denis Franz) into doing her own detective work. While pursued by the killer she’s repeatedly hustled, and leered at by men, a status as object only re-enforced by her job (although the film shows how she uses information from customers to gain investment info). The only male figure in the film to emerge sympathetically is Angie’s son, a tech-obsessed geek depicted in a pre-adolescent phase. The film seems to say that the only man worth anything is the one who hasn’t yet woken up to sex. What is a male-to-female trans-sexual but the ultimate male possession of woman, body and soul?

Stylistically the film contains some wonderful shots and techniques, really building on De Palma’s reputation as a Hitchcock style film-maker. The use of mirrors is especially well done, and a sequence on a train platform, and then in the train, masterfully ratchets up the tension. Some of the acting is a bit rough around the edges but overall it’s top entertainment and an example of the type of film Hollywood rarely makes these days; a modestly budgeted thriller aimed at adults.