Agent Carter (review)

One of the many nice touches put to Marvel’s latest extension of its on screen universe was a show within a show. At various points we’d see and hear the recording of radio serial called Captain America Adventure Program. It is kind the affair where the sound of a fight is evoked by somebody punching a leg of lamb.

Agent Carter clearly owes a lot to that kind of show. It has a lot of the tropes of an early cold war spy adventure: mysterious weapons with names like ‘implosion device’, car chases and Eastern European villains. And almost Mad Men like effort seems to have gone into replicating the style of the time: the cars, the suits and above all the lipstick! If you’re thinking this sounds like a lot of fun, then you’d be right!

However, it’s not trapped by the genre it’s pastiching. The most obvious example is that its hero and the most menacing villain are both women.

The titular Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) was the love interest in the first Captain America film. However, as she proved to be far the best thing about that otherwise so-so movie, she got her own show. It follows Peggy as she navigates life in Truman era New York. She’s still a special agent but now one hamstrung by the prejudices of her co-workers. She still gets to find stolen doomsday weapons, beat up goons and outsmart Russian spies. But she can now only do so behind the backs of her less capable co-workers.  While on the clock they treat her more like a secretary than a spy.

Another departure from its vintage inspirations is showing in war as something other than an opportunity for dare doing. Virtually, everything that happens in the series is in some way a repercussion of the war and pretty much every recurring character has been damaged by it in some way or another.

Depicting such a broad array of characters dealing with a difficult and potentially sensitive topic demands some solid acting. Fortunately, while it is undoubtedly Atwell’s show, the supporting cast is more than a match for the challenge. They are consistently excellent. Dollhouse fans will be pleased to see the woefully underused Enver Gjokaj given a high profile role.

Much as the series manages to utilise and transcend the conventions of 40s spy thrillers, it does the same with the Marvel Cinematic Universe it inhabits. It successfully fleshes out parts of that world. There are plenty of call backs and forwards to the films. This includes a rather chilling insight into the background of one of the Avengers.

If you’d not watched Captain America: the First Avenger then the plot would probably be hard to follow. Otherwise, one could enjoy it free from any thoughts of the broader Marvel world. Knowing, for example, that Tony Stark’s AI Jarvis is based on his real boyhood butler who becomes Peggy’s sidekick is satisfying for Marvel fans like me. However, a much bigger group can enjoy the great: story, lead performance, ensemble cast, period style and action scenes.

VERDICT: 9/10 – There’s still uncertainty over whether there will be a second series. As you can probably guess I not only want another series, I demand it NOW!!!

The Mind and Spirit of Cyberspace Security

These are dark times for internet freedom in China. A government that has always been hostile to open debate and free flow of information has of late intensified its efforts. Indeed, one can debate whether residents of China are still accessing the internet or a massive intranet that covers their whole nation.

This tragedy now has some farce to accompany it. Here is “The Mind and Spirit of Cyberspace Security” by the choir of the Chinese Internet Censorship agency:

HT: The Atlantic

The most controversial Wikipedia articles worldwide

UPDATE: having now had a brief chat with a couple of people who know considerably more about Wikipedia than me, I’m now pretty dubious about this chart.

Firstly, it’s now pretty out of date.

Secondly, reverts do not necessarily equate to controversy. They might, for example, represent an editor removing a piece of graffiti.

So proceed with caution before drawing any inferences from this.

 

 

The best things I’ve read lately (25/2/2015)

Belfast grapples with peace, coming in from the political wilderness and Birdman is dissected not least by Sesame Street.

If you’ve been reading my posts this week then you probably know that my reading has been dominated by the Oscars. The article that stood out was Tom Carson in the Atlantic making the case that Boyhood and not Birdman should have won best picture. I disagree with his conclusion but loved his argument:

Birdman vs. Boyhood is one of the rare Oscar tussles to define a tension that has been basic to movies ever since Georges Méliès and nickelodeon newsreels got busy doing their respective things. On one side, you’ve got your consciously extravagant showmen/impresarios/magicians, a camp whose ultimate hero (and martyr) will always be Orson Welles. On the other are the patient recorders of life who eschew virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake even when they’d be perfectly capable of it—patron saint, the Vittorio de Sica of Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine, with Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne as the tradition’s latest avatars.

Welles himself pegged the difference. “In handling a camera, I feel I have no peer,” he said in 1960. “But what de Sica can do, that I can’t do. I ran his Shoeshine again recently, and the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life…” Sue me for thinkingJust Life as an alternate title sums up Boyhood’s pretensions, as I Have No Peer would for Birdman’s.

Also in the Atlantic, Torie Rose Deghett visits Belfast and reports on how it is (or in many cases isn’t adjusting) to peace:

The much-visited walls remain because the city’s peace is still a process, and some residentscontinue to fear they would be attacked if the barriers came down. The largest of these, a structure of concrete topped with mesh and metal sheeting that rises 30 feet above Cupar Way, was erected to separate the Catholic-inhabited Clonard from Protestant-dominated Shankill following fiery clashes between those communities in August 1969. The wall was supposed to be temporary. Instead, it has simply grown in size, and dozens more have been constructed, some even since the end of the Troubles. According to the Belfast Interface Project, which researches the city’s divided communities, seven new barriers have been built since 2000—a testament to the enduring specter of sectarianism.

Katie Zavadski of New York magazine provides something I’ve been looking for for a while now: a collection of Andrew Sullivan’s best writings. She combines this with a potted history of blogging career, noting for example:

The interests of his blog were both general and personal, an eclectic mix that included Catholicism, pot, beards, beagles, and especially gay marriage, the case for which he started making years before anyone believed it remotely possible.

In amongst the posts she chooses is Sullivan’s thoughts on the morning the Supreme Court struck down the Orwellianly named Defense of Marriage Act:

“It is the most liberating feeling to hear your once near-solitary voice blend finally into a communal roar until it isn’t your voice at all any more. It’s the voice of justice.”

And returning to the Oscar theme my favourite video this week is Sesame Street paying tribute to Birdman:

The creator of the lobotomy was awarded a Nobel prize

The lobotomisation of Howard Dully by Dr Walter Freeman. The fact that Dully was only 12 at the time and the lack of any medical need has made this perhaps the most notorious example of the procedure.

Warning: this post contains potentially disturbing material.

In 1949, the Nobel Prize for medicine to two neurologists: Walter Rudolf Hess and Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz. Hess had discovered that different parts of the brain controlled different functions. Moniz was to find a deeply unfortunate application for this discovery. The official presentation speech included the following:

It occurred to Moniz that psychic morbid states accompanied by affective tension might be relieved by destroying the frontal lobes or their connections to other parts of the brain. On the basis of this idea Moniz gradually worked out an operative method whose purpose was to interrupt the lines of communication of the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. Since these lines of communication run through the white matter, this operation was called frontal or prefrontal leucotomy. It was soon found that morbid conditions in which emotional tension was a dominating part of the pathological picture reacted very favorably to such operations. To this group of diseases belong, primarily, states of depression accompanied by fear and anxiety, obsessive neuroses, certain forms of persecution mania, and a considerable part of the most important and common of all mental diseases, schizophrenia: those cases, namely, in which the schizophrenic pattern of behaviour and the emotional condition is affectively charged to a high degree, as for instance in states of anguish or anxiety, refusal to take food, aggressiveness, and the like. Great subjective suffering and invalidism are characteristic of this group of diseases. Many of the diseased, especially within the schizophrenic group, are very difficult patients and are often dangerous to the people around them. When it is remembered that other methods of treatment have failed or have been followed by recurrence of the disease, it is easy to understand the immense importance of Moniz’ discovery for the problems of psychiatric treatment. As was expected, the results are best for the non-schizophrenic groups, that is to say, among those suffering from depression, obsessive neurosis, and the like, where the great majority of patients operated upon have recovered and become capable of working. Within the schizophrenic group, where the disintegration of the personality has often advanced very far, the prospects are less favourable, but even in this group quite a few cases can be released from the mental hospitals, some of them after having fully regained the capacity for work. In other less favourable cases, the nursing problem will be much simplified by the fact that the patient, after operation, can be kept in a «quiet» ward.

The results would be horrifying. The procedure was essentially jamming an ice pick through someone’s eye socket and into their brain. Unsurprisingly that produced disturbing results:

The lobotomy in many cases either turned them into a vegetable or simply made them more docile, passive, and easy to control—often much less intelligent as well. Many of the doctors took this as being “good progress” because they didn’t know how else to treat severely mentally ill patients. During the days of the lobotomy, unless it killed someone they considered all of the permanent brain damage be a negative side effect of the treatment. Many of the people who have asked for the Nobel Prize awarded to Moniz to be rescinded have complained that they or their family members not only weren’t cured but suffered permanent damage that changed who they were and, in some cases, made it impossible for the individual to live a normal life. In one case, a pregnant woman was given the procedure simply for headaches, and afterward she was never the same again. It was more than just being like a child; she could not feed or take care of herself at all—it took her years just to relearn basic tasks. In another case, a boy named Howard Dully was lobotomized by a stepmother who didn’t like him, simply for being a difficult child. Freeman seriously recommended it as a way to change the child’s personality, and Dully spent most of his life feeling like a part of himself was missing.

There’s a whole article on Dully’s case from the Guardian. The extra details are as horrifying as you would expect. Worst of all is the scale of all this. Tens of thousands of these procedures were performed. On one occasion Freeman performed 25 lobotomies in a single day. This becomes all the more disturbing when you realise that 14% of those he lobotomised died as a direct result of the operation.

That along with his reckless evangelism must make Freeman the principal villain of this story. Nonetheless, Moniz is not necessarily innocent here. He has been criticised for not properly following up the patients he operated on. There’ve also been calls for his Nobel prize to be rescinded.

Hat tip:

Boyhood took Two Days, One Night’s nomination

Dear readers may I crave . Up till now I’ve not written about Boyhood for the simple reason that I only got round to watching it last night. Now I have, I’m thinking not only that Birdman was a more worthy winner but that its nomination should have gone to another film.

Now obviously saying, as the awards process requires, that one film is better than another is kind of stupid. Not only is such a judgement subjective, it also generally involves comparing things that are not really comparable. For example, imagine deciding, as Academy voters just did, whether Boyhood or Birdman is better? You might make judgements like Birdman is funnier or Boyhood is more realistic. But noticing this kind of thing is largely beside the point: Boyhood is not trying to be comic nor is Birdman trying to be naturalistic. The banal conclusion one generally ought to reach is that they are different.

However, there are occasions when one can compare like with like. For example, there were two films last year that told the story of explorers alone and adrift in a hostile environment: Gravity and All is Lost. The broad similarities in their plot and structure make it easier to pick out contrasts between the two films. Gravity was corny and predictable, whilst All is Lost generated far more pathos and tension. So I felt comfortable saying the Academy blew it by giving multiple nominations to Gravity but only a Sound Editing nomination for All is Lost.

This year, the part of Gravity was played by Boyhood. It received great plaudits for its central gimmick: shooting a single film over 12 years. And to be fair to Linklater, he pulls it off. Having placed himself under this constraint, he delivers a perfectly reasonable film.

That does not, however, mean that it:

…is not just good but revolutionary—a film that reconsiders, in surprising and rewarding ways, the medium’s relationship with time, with storytelling, and with its audience.

Boyhood does unfortunately illustrate why generally speaking one does not make a film in scattered bursts across a decade. The film’s energy is rather dissipated, it lacks energy is rather dissipated, it lacks direction or a plot and at times feels loose assemblage of short films rather than a feature film in its own right.

Even its great strength has been done better by another film this year: Two Days, One Night. Both films depict the very ordinary in a way that is nonetheless seems cinematic. Belgian directorial pairing the Dardenne brothers share with Linklater a talent for making their camera disappear and thereby convincing you that you are watching say a meal in a stranger’s house.

However, in Two Days the Dardenne’s take pretty much the opposite approach to Linklater in dealing with time. The film takes place not over a dozen years but (as the name implies) a single weekend. During that time we follow the efforts of Sandra (played by the Oscar nominated Marion Cotillard) to persuade her co-workers to forgo their annual bonuses so she can keep her job. This framing gives it precisely the kind of form and purpose Boyhood lacks.

While I think the above point is the most important point in Two Days favour, it also benefits enormously from its central performance. While the acting in Boyhood has rightly been praised none of it matches Cotillard’s achievement. Her face is on screen in close up for the majority of the film’s running time. Yet Sandra’s personality and depression as filtered through the Dardenne’s ultra-realistic style demand that she is generally rather subdued. So Cotillard has to carry the audience through more or less the whole film while conveying a massive inner struggle in only the subtlest of ways.

It is also worth mentioning that Two Days offers a deep and affecting look at mental illness and deindustrialisation. By contrasts, Boyhoods’ attempts at tackling ‘issues’ wind up seeming more like hit and runs than a proper exploration of them.

Yet, like All is Lost the year before, Two Days only received a single nomination. It deserved better. Though I’m delighted that having been snubbed by every other major award Cotillard was nominated for an Oscar. If you’ve not seen Two Days then I’d really recommend seeking it out.

Why conservatives aren’t funny

“Although it is not true that all liberals are funny, it is true that most funny people are liberal.”

In a feature for the Atlantic, Oliver Morrison asks why comedy seems to lean to the left. He focuses on America where he observes there are few conservative equivalents of the Daily Show and Colbert Reports and that those there are have few viewers. We can see the same thing in the UK where the likes of Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry, Jeremy Hardy, Sandi Toksvig, Mark Steele, Mark Thomas, Stewart Lee, David Mitchell etc. are off set by Jim Davidson and…..ummm…he’s basically it. Morrison wonders if this is because politics is correlated with personality type and different personalities are drawn to different kinds of humour:

At the end of the 1990s, when Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show, conservatives dominated one form of entertainment media: talk radio. Liberals have never managed to equal conservatives’ success in that arena. The Air America network—whose talent included Rachel Maddow, as well as Saturday Night Live alumnus and future Senator Al Franken—filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of 2010. Even MSNBC has never been able to attract as large an audience as Fox News, the televised version of conservative talk radio.

Could it be that American political satire is biased toward liberals in the same way that American political talk radio is biased toward conservatives? Dannagal Young, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Delaware, was looking into the lack of conservative comedians when she noticed studies that found liberals and conservatives seemed to have different aesthetic tastes. Conservatives seemed to prefer stories with clear-cut endings. Liberals, on the other hand, had more tolerance for a story like public radio’s Serial, which ends with some uncertainty and ambiguity.

Young began to wonder whether this might explain why liberals were attracted in greater numbers to TV shows that employ irony. Stephen Colbert, for example, may say that he’s looking forward to the sunny weather that global warming will bring, and the audience members know this isn’t what he really means. But they have to wonder: Is he making fun of the kind of conservative who would say something so egregious? Or is he making fun of arrogant liberals who think that conservatives hold such extreme views?

As Young noticed, this is a kind of ambiguity that liberals tend to find more satisfying and culturally familiar than conservatives do. In fact, a study out of Ohio State University found that a surprising number of conservatives who were shown Colbert clips were oblivious to the fact that he was joking.

In contrast, conservative talk radio humor tends to rely less on irony than straightforward indignation and hyperbole. When Rush Limbaugh took down Georgetown student and birth-control activist Sandra Fluke in 2012, he called her a “slut” in order to drive home his point about state-mandated birth control. After the liberal blogosphere erupted with derision, Limbaugh responded with more jokes, asking that Fluke post videos of her sex online so taxpayers could see what they were paying for. (After a few days, he offered a public apology, insisting that he “did not mean a personal attack” on Fluke.)

These examples formed the kernel of Young’s theory that liberals and conservatives look for and see different kinds of humor. Connover, the producer of [right leaning satrical show] The Flipside, has already voiced skepticism about Young’s hypothesis. “That’s another way of saying that liberals are smarter,” Connover said. “And clearly that’s not the case. Liberals are some of the dumbest people to walk the earth.” Young insists that hypothesis is not about intelligence; it’s about a preferred structure of jokes. She maintains that there’s nothing inherently better about liking ironic jokes over exaggerated ones.

If this view is accurate then I’m afraid it doesn’t reflect well on conservatives and their ability to govern. The world is a place replete with uncertainty and our politics has to be able to cope with that. If you can’t handle the ambiguity you find in an episode of the Colbert Report then you’re going to find the Syrian Civil War utterly impossible.

No Bollywood film has ever been nominated for a music Oscar

^Bolo Na from Chittagong. Winner of the 2013 Silver Lotus Award for best lyrics. In the same year the Academy decided only to nominate two of a possible six films for the Best Song Oscar^

I have pretty big reservations about the Oscars. When this year’s nominations were announced I blogged that:

The pale, male and stale voters of the Academy retain a strong preference for a particular kind of film. The nominations have as always gone disproportionately to English language dramas at the more worthy end of the mainstream with actors and directors the academy is familiar with which go on general release in the United States.

A particularly stark illustration of this comes from the Academy’s music categories.

They are generally much criticised. In a recent article for AV Club Jesse Hassenger works through the most striking songs in the films of 2014 and shows how technicalities kept virtually all of them were kept off the Academy’s Long List. For example, he observes that none of the songs from Belle and Sebastian film God Help the Girl were eligible because they’d appeared on a 2009 album by the band and were therefore not originally from a film. This rule applied even though it appears that the songs were written with the specific intent they be used in a musical and the album was an attempt to garner interest in a project that eventually became God Help the Girl. Hassenger writes that the result is that:

the music division’s old-fashioned tastes combined with various rulings makes them seem vaguely hostile to any musical artists operating outside of a standard movie-score (or in the case of songs, Broadway-style) framework.

Possibly the worse year for the best song category was 2012 when the Academy found the year’s offerings so limited that it only nominated two rather the usual six. ‘Am a man or a muppet’ from the Muppets went on to win. Which is a charming but otherwise not particularly interesting song.

Now had the Academy wished to look for a wider selection of songs from films where would it have had to look? I would suggest the obvious answer is India. It has the largest film industry in the world as measured by the number of feature films produced each year. And of course music plays a massively larger part in those films than it does in Hollywood’s output. This point is illustrated by the fact that India’s National Film Awards have (by my count) six categories devoted to music compared with the two at the Oscars.

Yet the Academy appears never to nominate songs or scores from Bollywood films. Wikipedia’s (extraordinarily short) list of Indians nominated for Academy Awards can be to divided pretty easily into categories: 1) nominees for Best Foreign Language Film and 2) Indians working on British or American produced films. This later group do get nominated and indeed win. A.R.Rahman picked up golden statuettes for both score and song for his work on Slumdog Millionaire. Yet it seems that no one working on an Indian film for a South Asian audience has even got a nomination.

I’ve looked in vein for an explanation of why this is. It might be that they also fall victim to technicalities, that the people drawing up the long list simply don’t think to include choices from Bollywood or that Indian distributors don’t put their films forward. Whatever the reason it is a stark illustration of the parochialism of the Oscars.

The Academy may theoretically be an international organisation but its based in the US and that’s where the vast bulk of its membership comes from. The National Film Awards are sometimes called ‘India’s Oscars’ and perhaps it would be better if we thought about the Academy Awards not as ‘the Oscars’ but as ‘America’s Oscars’. They represent primarily American tastes and a small slice of American tastes at that. They are the output of a process by which a series of heavily lobbied old, white, American men make subjective choices about which films they personally preferred. There’s nothing wrong with that but it means they are not the definitive marker of cinematic quality they are often taken to be.

The case against a Best Motion Capture Performance Oscar

Andy Serkis deserves an Oscar but it should be for acting not in some specially created category.

The winners of this year’s Academy Awards will be announced tomorrow. However, we already know that some of the best performances of the past year won’t be winning anything. In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Andy Serkis and Toby Kebbell convincingly portray chimpanzees yet give them fully developed personalities. However, neither of them has been nominated. Neither did Serkis get any recognition for his turn as Gollum where he delivered the kind of pathos that the rest of the Lord of the Rings trilogy lacked.

Serkis being overlooked despite his evident talent and the fact that he’s pioneering a new form of acting has lead to calls to create a new Oscar category to recognise motion capture work. For example, the AV Club’s suggestions for new categories includes such a category because:

Once a novelty designed to add authenticity to awkward CGI and animation, motion capture has risen to prominence in recent years thanks to improved technology and greater public awareness of the process. The most likely turning point was Andy Serkis’ work as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings trilogy; for the first time, a performer’s work in the field seemed like more than just an excuse for behind-the-scenes footage of someone wearing weird clothes and making funny faces. But as Serkis’ star has continued to rise, in movies like King Kong and the new Planet Of The Apes franchise, the inability to reward the actor for his efforts, and react to the shift in public and industry perception of the process, has lead to frustrating conversations about whether or not motion capture performing really counts as “acting” at all. The best solution would be to create a specific award to acknowledge the work of both the performer and the effects team whose collaboration often leads to such impressive results. Serkis may be the most famous motion capture actor right now, but the process isn’t going away any time soon, and an Oscar category would be a smart way to honor (sic) great and previously unrecognized work.

I think this misses the point. There already exist categories that recognise what Serkis is doing: best actor and best supporting actor. Merriam-Webster’s definition of acting is: “the art or practice of representing a character on a stage or before cameras.” This is exactly what Serkis does. He creates a voice, expressions, mannerisms and a style of moving that allows the audience to feel they are watching say Gollum. Motion-capture performance is a sub-set of acting not an alternative to it.

A pretty clear demonstration of this is to watch Serkis bring those same characters to life without using mo-cap:

Another is that most mo-cap performers also do regular acting. Serkis himself appeared sans mo-cap suit in the Prestige and will be doing so again this year in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Indeed in some cases a character may be portrayed by a single actor using mo-cap for some scenes and not for others. The most obvious example is Mark Ruffalo playing Bruce Banner and then using motion capture when he becomes the Hulk. And there is scene in Lord of the Rings where we see Gollum before he’s horribly warped by the ring. Did Peter Jackson need to find someone other than Serkis to do that scene because now what was required was acting? Of not, he just got Serkis to act without the mo-cap suit.

Where of course, mo-cap performances differ is that once the actor has delivered them, the visual effects team then has to affect a visual transformation. They have, in the case of Dawn, to (in the word of Honest Trailers) replace ‘a small British man in a unitard’ with a chimpanzee. But is this different in anything other than degree to using makeup or costume to change an actor’s appearance? In contrast to when an actor gives their voice to an animated character, the physical aspects of the character are still largely the actor’s responsibility. The whole point of those dots and skin tight suits is to capture all the small movements the actor makes.

Indeed if the Academy wished to create a new acting category, then voice acting seems like a much more obvious choice as that is fundamentally different. It would also avoid one of the pitfalls of a Best Mo-Cap Performance Oscar: a narrow field.

Imagine trying to find six worthy performances to nominate this year. Clearly you’d have Serkis. Kebbell probably wouldn’t be put forward so as not to drain support from his co-star. That would leave good but nowhere near Oscar worthy performances from the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch in the Hobbit and Karen Gillan in Guardians of the Galaxy.

It would also be a nightmare to work out eligibility. Would Mark Ruffalo’s work in the Avengers count given that as already discussed he’s only using motion capture for part of the film? How about when, as seems to have happened a lot in Guardians of the Galaxy, different actors did the motion capture and the voice work?

Much simpler would be for the Academy to do what it should already have done. Next time it sees an actor (probably Andy Serkis) give a motion capture performance that deserves to be nominated for best actor or supporting actor, it should nominate them!

A 129 minute adolescent fantasy

Kingsman imitates old fashioned spy movies and in the process demonstrates why they went out of fashion in the first place.

I was really looking forward to Kingsman. It had an impressive cast, I’d enjoyed the directors turn making an x-men movie and the trailer made it look like enormous fun. That, however, just set me up to be sorely disappointed. It’s not only bad but in places actually rather nasty.

Don’t get me wrong, there are things to like in Kingsman. Colin Firth is clearly enjoying his turn as an unlikely action hero and that in turn is fun to watch. Samuel L. Jackson delivers as an unhinged villain and the couple of scenes where he and Firth are on screen together are by far the best in the film. Some of the action sequences are impressive (at least if you haven’t seen the Matrix) and I might be more fulsome about them had the much praised church scene not fallen prey to Vietnamese censors. And it would be fair to say that while I didn’t enjoy much of it, I wasn’t bored either.

However, the films driving conviction appears to be that we need more Roger Moore era James Bond films. I beg to differ. There’s a reason that the Bond franchise has gone in a very different direction. The Bourne films made a compelling case that secret agent films are (surprisingly) more entertaining if they take themselves seriously and retain a connection to reality. It’s easier to empathise with a hero who finds something unsettling about constantly killing and having people trying to kill them. What kind of monster wouldn’t be? It’s also too easy for a tongue in cheek film with invisible cars, jetpacks or whatever to tip over into outright farce.

Now I remember reading somewhere a quip that ‘if Daniel Craig is your favourite Bond, you’re not actually a Bond fan.’ Well Craig is my favourite Bond and I don’t disagree with that assertion. Nonetheless, I think that even if you look at the Bond films that came before Casino Royale they bear out the contention that darker and more realistic normally works better. They follow a pretty clear pattern whereby the best films of an actor’s tenure as Bond are normally their earlier, more grounded efforts. Then as they go along things become progressively more ludicrous and corny. Compare From Russia with Love to You Only Live Twice or Goldeneye to Die Another Day.

That said if for some reason homage had to be paid to the James Bond films that least deserved it then there could still be a better film to be made than Kingsman. Let’s start with sexual politics. These have rightly come in for quite some criticism, most notably for a scene in which a damsel in distress promises the hero anal sex if he rescues her.  You could also point to the fact that the token female Kingsman spends a lot of her screen time whimpering and is wholly excluded from the climatic action sequence. Indeed you could also observe that none of the female characters really have much of a personality. However, that would be an unfair criticism as neither do most of their male counterparts.

It might be tempting to conclude this is an inevitable outgrowth of trying to make a Seventies style spy movie but that there are alternatives. One can push things over into outright parody a la Archer. Or one can pastiche a period without blindly copying its more dubious values: witness how Agent Carter has given 1940s spy serials a feminist twist. Kingsman lacks the imagination or inclination to do either.

In fact, its major flaw is that it is so besotted with retro spy movies that it becomes formulaic. If you’ve seen one of those films then you’ll have no difficulty guessing what’s coming next in Kingsman.