Reel Entropy

EVERYBODY IN THE MOSH PIT. Photos courtesy 20th Century Fox.

If Kick-Ass was Kill Bill meets Superbad, Kingsman: The Secret Service is Deathproof meets Trading Places meets Octopussy. 

A wobbly adaptation of the six-issue Mark Millar limited series The Secret Service, the movie is a combination of willfully recycled rags-to-riches and super spy tropes. The main character, high school and military dropout Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton), lives with his mother (Samantha Womack), who is in a harshly abusive relationship with a local gang boss, when he is plucked from the slums by Galahad (Colin Firth), a member of an international spy agency conspicuously composed exclusively of British aristocrats who name themselves after knights of Arthurian legend. Unwin begins training to become the next Lancelot, while Internet magnate Richard Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) lurks in the background.

This movie’s got jokes, but it can’t escape an overall sloppy nature and artistic purpose. There’s a lot of meta commentary, particularly in a scene between Galahad and Valentine in which they reminisce on older, sillier spy movies. Professor James Arnold was named Mark Hamill in the comic, so his character is renamed and they brought in Mark Hamill the actor to play him. It’s playful, and there are a lot of little bits of fun in there, but they’re not pervasive enough to save a movie that set out to combine archetypes and does a poor job of it.

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This visual, echoed in both the film’s opening and its abrupt, snazzy close, is exactly what I’m talking about. Sam Taylor-Johnson did a brilliant job with this movie despite clearly being shackled to the source material, no pun intended. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.

The target audience for Fifty Shades of Grey is women who are somehow both older than 17 and still immature enough that nudity makes them giggle, but it does have much more to offer as a film.

The movie follows Ana Steele (Dakota Johnson), a virginal college student on the edge of graduation. She is sent to interview her commencement speaker Christian Grey (Jamie Dorman) in lieu of her journalist friend (Eloise Mumford), who really ought to have passed the task off on a coworker instead of her roommate. Steele and Grey are immediately attracted to each other and begin a romantic relationship, but tension arises between Grey’s fetishes and constant attempts to morph Steele into an obedient set of girl parts and Steele’s sexual inexperience and desire for a more normal relationship.

As previously discussed, despite the negativity surrounding the book, this movie still had a lot of potential. It’s got a good base story — it’s hyper-focused on two characters who just entered into a relationship and both very much want to be together, but are driven apart by their different stages of romantic and sexual development. Steele has never been in a relationship and wants to work her way slowly into a conventional one, but also wants to be with Grey in the ways he’s used to. Grey has a traumatic upbringing and sexual abuse in his past and doesn’t view himself as capable of having normal relationships, so he sabotages what relationships he does have by insisting on demeaning his partner sexually and controlling her in some very unhealthy ways. This has a fantastic set of internal conflicts within Steele and Grey and tension leading to conflict between them. The book’s execution was laughably poor, but with a film adaptation, a mostly new set of people gets a fresh crack at that aspect.

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I’m really not sure how to feel about the bait and switch here. Many of the lines in the trailer aren’t in the movie at all and it outright lies about Burger Beard’s plot. Slash’s scenes were all cut from the final product. But at the same time, the movie follows through on all its basic promises. Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Well, if you wanted a feature-length episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, here you go.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water’s advertising — and title, for that matter — hinged mostly on the scenes where SpongeBob SquarePants (Tom Kenny) and crew are on the beach in CGI, and that’s a little deceptive as they spend only a long denouement on dry land, about 25 minutes out of 93.

The real plot of the movie is divided into rough thirds. The pirate from the series’ opening theme is re-cast as Captain Burger Beard (Antonio Banderas), a greedy swashbuckler with an amphibious food truck and reality-warping powers which he uses to steal the secret recipe to Mr. Krabs’ (Clancy Brown) krabby patties, famously addictive in Bikini Bottom. Upon the recipe’s seemingly magical disappearance, the town is thrown into Mad Max-style dystopian chaos, with the acolytes pursuing the last two creatures to lay hands on the recipe — SquarePants and Plankton (Mr. Lawrence). The duo escape through time, and their time-traveling shenanigans make up the main body of the movie. After that segment is over, the whole town embarks on a long journey to confront Burger Beard.

It feels slimy to not call this movie out for reneging on so many of its specific promises, but Sponge Out of Water shows folks what they came to see. While most of the series isn’t coherent enough to draw a full movie from, this film’s journey is a good length, well-paced and always entertaining. The potty humor is still present — the toilet paper sticks to the extra-dimensional dolphin’s fin just a touch too long — but most of the movie is sideways enough that it avoids descending into predictability.

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