“This ain’t The King’s Speech, bro.” Image via Forbes

January and February are typically Hollywood’s dumping ground months. This is the time when studios just want you to see the Oscar leftovers that they released the last week of December. This is the time of Uwe Boll and Kevin Hart to reign. But once awards season ends, there is something refreshing about watching a movie in which nobody dies from a terminal illness. I don’t care what the groundhog said; with Kingsman: The Secret Service, summer has come early.

Kingsman is one of those movies that plants seeds and bread crumbs early on. At first, they seem pointless but later, they blossom into beautiful flowers and loafs of bread. At a young age, Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is visited by Galahad (Colin Firth), a member of the secretive Kingsmen, who are basically England’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The visit is really just to give him a secret necklace that belonged to his father. Fate will bring them together years later, when Eggsy is a delinquent dealing with a drunken step dad. You can normally catch him getting in bar fights at the pub. He is a lot better at starting fights than he is at finishing them. He is basically an Edgar Wright character transplanted into a Matthew Vaughn Joint.

I didn’t realize that Kingsman was based on a comic until the end of the movie, because this story seems like one so perfectly suited for a movie. It occupies this strange halfway zone between James Bond and Austin Powers, in that it is a farce about secret agents who could actually go face-to-face with 007. They use everything from machine guns to, in a very British fashion, an umbrella, as weapons.  This makes for a winning combination of action and comedy.

Part of what makes Kingsman so fun to watch is its inspired casting choices. If we had merely gotten the chance to see the charming and mild-mannered Colin Firth demolish a bunch of bigots, then that would have been enough. Instead, we also get Samuel L. Jackson as a villain who acts Lex Luthor but dresses like Justin Bieber. Despite how crazy and in control he is, there is a big part of him that is largely powerless, especially in the dynamic with his metal-legged sidekick (Sofia Boutella). It is a great reminder that despite how many movies and how many credit card commercial he does, Samuel L. Jackson isn’t always phoning it in. The dude can really lay an f-bomb down.

Kingsman comes from the director/writer team of Matthew Vaugh and Jane Goldman, who more than make up for X-Men: First Class. Vaughn’s directorial style will draw the ire of some and the enjoyment of others. He has an extremely nonchalant approach to violence. Heads explode and hands go flying as if these are both normal occurrences. It feels spiritually linked to Kick-Ass in that all the bloodshed would be shocking if it weren’t so funny. Vaughn’s films are never incredibly “deep,” which is a shame, especially when you’re trying to make a film that’s partially about the ethics of trying to control human population. Kingsman, like Vaughn’s other movies, is a triumph of style over substance. It is the movie equivalent of really filling cotton candy.

Occasionally, Kingsman dips its toes into meta humor. “It’s not that kind of movie,” Valentine (Jackson) says before pulling off a shocking plot twist. This isn’t some way to tear down the action genre, but rather to celebrate something that it is taking a part of. Matthew Vaughn likes to participate in a light meta humor that is more playful than savage. After all, even if the film makes some great strides to avoid plot holes and conveniences, it still rips a page out of the Indepedence Day playbook with the implementation of a computer virus. At one point, a major female character is introduced who should be the love interest. While it is great that the film takes her in a different direction, I am not sure if completely removing her from most of the action is the direction that they should have taken.

Please, don’t let that last paragraph turn you off. I am a blogger, and if I don’t find something to hate on, then my batteries will run out and I will die. I left Kingsman with a giant grin on my face that won’t go away. It proves that great action has a way of secretly getting you invested in characters and mythology. This is the kind of movie that I will probably see on TV one day. When I do, I will stop, and won’t change the channel. That is a high compliment.

Brain Farts From The Edge

• Perhaps Colin Firth is the next Liam Neeson a.k.a. a respected actor who will enter the next part of his career as an action star. It suits him well.
• Kingsman just made me want to go to a pub and grab a pint. Also, are British people just that good at drinking whiskey? Seriously, they chug really good whiskey like its water.
• There is a scene that brilliantly uses a tired classic rock song. It is the most gloriously ‘Murican moment in a very British film. You’ll know when you see it.
• Kingsman has given me at least a little bit of insight into British Bro Culture.
• So, how much longer until Taron Egerton gets cast in a Marvel movie?
• I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Mark Strong is British Stanley Tucci
• This movie also reminded me a lot of Mystery Men. And if you haven’t seen Mystery Men yet then what the hell are you doing here?

In this episode of the podcast, I rejoice the new world order. Plus, why Pulp Fiction still matters 20 years on. Check out the article I wrote about Pulp Fiction here.

A man and a woman as partners? In a movie? Do you think there’ll be sexual tension between them? Image via Business Insider

The differences between Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the latest Captain America installment, shows how much the Marvel Universe has changed and expanded in just three years.

The Winter Solider happens to combine both the worlds of Captain America and The Avengers: half of it is a promotion for a bunch of Marvel stories that I have little interest in, and the other half is a Captain America movie. Leave it to Disney to replace traditional product placement with promotion of their own products.

The latest Captain America has the honor of being the sequel to two different movies: The First Avenger and The Avengers. My head hurts. Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans) is now a full-time agent for the government agency S.H.I.E.L.D., working with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to bring down all existential threats. Trouble is afoot in the nation’s capital, and nobody is to be trusted. I know this because Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) says “don’t trust anybody” multiple times (I tried to count), in case you forgot that this is a movie and bad things are supposed to happen in movies.

While the first Captain America was a send-up killin-Nazi World War II films, The Winter Soldier takes place mostly in the present day, and is more in line with paranoid, post-911 political thrillers. I really liked the first Captain America even though others did not. It had a Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe to it: very inspired by the past, and very much into taking itself seriously while also acknowledging its own silliness. Winter Soldier only seems committed to doing that sometimes. With its undertones about N.S.A. surveillance, The Winter Soldier fancies itself as an allegorical comic book movie of Dark Knight proportions. Hey, at least it tries.

However, there are some more interesting aspects of the Captain America mythology that transcend current events, such as Captain America serving as a symbol of hope to uplift an entire frightened army, and also to sell a lot of war bonds. However, the two films have made this idea into something of an afterthought. It will get to that as soon as it finishes telling you how this one scene totally relates to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Winter Soldier is essentially two different films, with one half being better than the other. Besides one great car chase, the first half is bogged down by exposition. Every time somebody is about to do something, they have to take a break from what they are doing to explain why they are doing it. The more it tries to elevate its plot, the more The Winter Soldier becomes a great, big muddle.

But then, after a few plot twists in a row, The Winter Soldier does something that the normal blockbuster usually fails to do: it surprises you. It settles the difference between two separate timelines and mixes them with a tinge of Cold War paranoia. First and foremost, this is an action movie, and once everybody stops explaining things, The Winter Soldier delivers. This was one of the few times where I actually regretted not shelling out a few extra bucks for IMAX 3D. The Russo Brothers, perhaps known best for their work on TV comedies such as Arrested Development and Community, were an odd yet fun choice to helm The Winter Soldier.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is just part of the movie that I wanted to see. There are high stakes and tension, as well as an awesome performance by Robert Redford. However, to get to all of that, you have to slog through a muddle that is completely unsure of itself. Winter Soldier is a mess that only works sometimes. For the future, I hope Marvel works on separating its individual heroes from the universe somewhat. While I love world-building and characters who step out of their respective films and into another, it would be great if Marvel’s films could hold back a little bit and let the characters grow just as much as the mythology.

Brain Farts From The Edge

• In the beginning, Captain America shows he has a list of all of the things he missed when he traveled forward in time. Here are the ones I caught: “Berlin Wall, Nirvana (Band), Steve Jobs (Apple)”
• There’s a very small Pulp Fiction reference. Look closely. It’s brilliant.
• No, I don’t know why Garry Shandling is in this either.
• There is a part where Captain America and Black Widow have to hide out at Sam Wilson’s (Anthony Mackie) house. They say that they aren’t safe outside. He says it’s cool. It is almost exactly like a scene from Zoolander.
• I really wish they could have brought Loki into this. Speaking of which, I should probably watch the Thor movies now.
• With all of these crossovers, I have been trying to imagine if there were Disney-Marvel crossovers, given that Disney owns Marvel. So far, I have two: Elsa from Frozen is asked to join The Avengers; The Daily Bugle goes digital so they hire Dog With A Blog to be their new web editor.
• So much of this movie looks like it was shot on Google Maps. with a heavy use of Google Street View.
• Superheroes could probably defeat villains much faster if they didn’t spend so much time uploading stuff to hard drives.
• Now, how much longer until Guardians of the Galaxy comes out?

This did end up working to my advantage, however, because I had no bias going into this remake. Whatever this movie did, it would not feel like it was ruining any part of my childhood. As a movie, “RoboCop” could have done much, much worse. However, it is just there. It doesn’t do much, and it doesn’t contribute much to the character or sci-fi itself. It just kind of expects you to be thrilled.

“RoboCop” is set in the year 2025, a future that is dystopian only because of how generic it is. OmniCorp is a huge corporation that specializes in building giant killing machines. The company is headquartered in Detroit. I can’t even imagine the amount of people who okayed this remake because using Detroit would somehow make it socially relevant. The company’s ambitious yet morally bankrupt CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) wants to release crime-fighting robots that will be put on America’s streets. This idea is not exactly warmly welcomed, given that robots can, you know, turn and kill people indiscriminately. Instead, OmniCorp decides to put a man in a robot suit. The man inside the RoboCop suit is Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), a Detroit police officer who nearly dies in the line of duty. The RoboCop suit is the one thing that saves his life. He is literally a bunch of organs trapped in a suit of armor. The movie really misses the chance to explore what this actually feels like. Instead, it just decides to show a bunch of nauseating shots of a man’s lungs moving. Hey, at least this helped me realize what the line is between showing too much and not enough. Learn from your mistakes, everyone.

Of all of the people that could have picked up on the RoboCop legacy, I am not sure why it had to be somebody this boring. No offense to Mr. Kinnaman, who I am sure is a fine actor, but he brings absolutely none of the charisma or pathos that is required in order to be a leading man in a movie like this. However, this seems more like a failure on the part of the writers to make a man turning completely into an emotionless machine interesting. The director just kept yelling, “come on, guys! We need more shots of his lungs!”

In fact, all of the characters here are fairly boring, with barely a unique personality to spare. They yell trite lines of dialogue at each like “I can explain” and “we’re running out of time!” and in between that they yell at each other about whether Alex Murphy is a man or a machine without giving us much reason to care. They all make a lot of big speeches and throw around a lot of big words, their favorite being “dopamine.” As Inigo Montoya would say, “you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“RoboCop” wants to skewer the loud, proud media landscape of talking heads, and it almost does. The sharpest piece of satire is the CNN style show The Novak Element hosted by Pat Novak, played by none other than Samuel L. Jackson. Novak is a jingoistic commentator who cares more about his opinions than he does about American safety. The news show itself looks exactly like the direction that cable news is going in, with holograms and floating, computer-generated pie charts making up for actual substance. You just know that Samuel L. Jackson got paid millions for what was probably three hours worth of work. Well, at least he only half phones it in here. This is what we get when we don’t give Samuel L. Jackson awards when he actually tries. But I digress. The point is that The Novak Element belongs in a much different movie. It belongs in the kind of movie that can keep its political allegories straight. It belongs in the kind of movie that brings up drones and doesn’t forget about it two minutes later.

The remainder of “RoboCop” has absolutely no idea what kind of future it wants to convey. It suffers from “Oblivion” Effect: it uses minimalism both as a way to define the future and avoid having to come up with real ideas. It seems unfair to compare “RoboCop” to “Her,” as they both have completely different goals. However, one thing that every dystopian blockbuster could learn from “Her” is that the most convincing future is the one that actually has a sense of how the people who inhabit it feel. The world has changed a lot since 1987, yet “RoboCop” feels like it has barely reacted to that 27 year age gap. Remember, we live in a world where machines are as much our enemies as they are our best friends.

Perhaps the biggest crime “RoboCop” commits is that it isn’t any fun at all. The action scenes feel like they belong in an arcade game like Time Crisis, and the guy barely gets to use the suit at all. The idea behind “RoboCop” is a fairly cheesy one that would have benefited from somebody who was willing to have more fun with it. Oh wait, they already had a movie like that recently. It was called “Iron Man.” While “RoboCop” isn’t the worst remake that has ever been made, it never once feels like it has any reason to actually exist.

Brain Farts From The Edge

• The beginning of “RoboCop” was actually really promising, and replacing the MGM Lion’s roar with Samuel L. Jackson clearly his throat is the most bold artistic choice this movie makes. Basically, if the best part of your movie happens before the movie even starts, then yeah, your movie sucks.
• “RoboCop” felt like a setup for a sequel that nobody asked for.
• I really wish they had more of Alex trying to recover his memories while in the RoboCop suit. That is a really cool idea. Not as cool as “The Wizard of Oz,” but maybe a little cooler than the Detroit Lions.
• As my friend Ryan Little (a.k.a. Tremendous Jackson) said, “Michael Keaton is the guy who did the best Kevin Spacey impression in the casting session.”
• Another reason that “RoboCop” didn’t have to get remade is because Hollywood has been doing some variation of this idea for at least the past two decades. The idea of machine turning against man is so trite at this point that it barely means anything when it could mean everything in today’s technology-dependent society.
• On that note, this is the exact reason I liked “Her” so much. In terms of robot movies, “Her” is like “E.T.”: “E.T.” felt fresh because for the first time, someone made a movie where aliens didn’t want to eradicate mankind. Likewise, “Her” is the first movie where machines just want to be our friends and have sex with us and stuff like that.
• This RoboCop might as well be Turbo Man from “Jingle All the Way.”
• “RoboCop” almost reaches so-bad-its-good territory. Almost. There are some cheesy moments, but they are more annoying than fun. Two examples: RoboCop at one point does that Batman voice; the noises that RoboCop makes as he moves are the equivalent of somebody repeatedly saying “meep morp I’m a robot.”
• This movie tried way too hard to be a “Batman” movie, straight down to the way Detroit was shot. It was like they were trying to re-create a really shitty Gotham.
• This movie has some of the worst set design I’ve ever seen. The yarn balls placed above the TV in the Murphy home made me think of the infamous spoon portrait in “The Room.”
• I actually really like Jay Baruchel, but he is so miscast here. He should be playing Steven Karp, not high power marketing executives.  
• I am only half-joking when I say this: I really wish they cast Nicolas Cage as RoboCop. At least he would have brought some personality to the role.
• Jose Padilha owes a public apology to Peter Weller, Gary Oldman, and Joe Strummer.
• Okay, okay, I’ll go watch the original now.