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Apr 24 2024
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Movie Review – The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)

Spy stuff! Action! Suspense! The inspiration for James Bond!

BQB here with a review of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

It’s very rare in today’s exceedingly woke times to see an action movie where men are macho and are allowed to blow shit up, wreak havoc, shoot guns and damn it, my ding dong just got hard thinking about it. Excuse me for a moment. Talk amongst yourselves.

Alright, I’m back. Based on former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s declassified in 2016 documents, this story tells the tale of the UK’s first special forces mission, which essentially began MI6 or Great Britain’s first foray into spycraft and/or clandestine missions. Coincidentally, it was also the inspiration for the James Bond films, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

It’s WW2 and the Nazis command the Atlantic Ocean. They’re choking off trade to England, sinking supply ships with their U-Boats. Said boats are supplied by only 4 ships based in Fernando Po, an island colony in Africa owned by then neutral Spain. To bomb the port outright would be to bring Spain into the war on the side of the Nazis, an outcome to be avoided. Thus, Winston Churchill (a heavily made up Rory Kinnear) with assistance of Brigadier Gubbins (Cary Elwes) recruits a “dirty dozen” (not exactly a dozen) but a collection of “war criminals” – i.e. not atrocity perpetrators in the war crime sense but soldiers who have been thrown in prison because for whatever reason, they didn’t follow orders.

This is a dirty job, one requiring men who will be disavowed if caught, so Churchill needs men with less than stellar reputations, willing to get their hands dirty and the dirtiest among them is Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) who leads the squad. Cavill looks like he had fun with this one, laughing maniacally as he shoots and blows up Nazis.

March would go on to be the inspiration for James Bond, the character in a series of novels penned by Ian Fleming, who has a minor role as a character in the film played by Freddie Fox. Apparently, his time as Grubbins’ assistant in the operation inspired Fleming to put pen to paper.

Directed by Guy Ritchie who has a great track record.

Overall, it’s quite a fun film and a much needed relief from super woke fare. Go see it today.

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Feb 04 2024
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Movies

Movie Review – Argylle (2024)

Spies fly off the page and into action, 3.5 readers. BQB here with a review.

At the outset, let me say I give this movie a solid C +. It passed the minimum standards required for me to not demand a ticket refund but it didn’t razzle dazzle me either. It had cute, funny moments but ultimately, I’ll never watch it again and won’t think of it much a year from now. It was made by Apple and had all the earmarks of a streaming movie, so much so that I wondered why I didn’t just wait two weeks until I could stream it in the comfort of my own home.

Sidenote – A couple of weeks ago I noticed the Beekeeper was made by Amazon and this week this movie is made by Apple. Alas, when I was a kid I thought the movie business was out of my reach. If only someone had told me that I just need to learn how to code. Oh well. Moving on.

This is one of those films where the trailer is better than the movie. On paper, the idea is pretty solid. A spy novelist (Bryce Dallas Howard) pens the fabulous adventures of Agent Argyle (Henry Cavill) who, with the help of his handler (John Cena) and tech specialist (Ariana DeBose) fights the evil femme fatale LaGrange (Dua Lipa).

In reality, the novelist’s life is quite bland and mousy indeed. She’s scared of everyone and everything, her only friend her cat Alfie who she takes everywhere in a special backpack with ventilation holes. Alfie is the best part of an otherwise paint by numbers movie.

One day while on a train ride to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara), novelist Ellie is attacked by mysterious assailants in a scene straight out of one of her bestsellers. Real life undercover spy Aiden (Sam Rockwell) comes to the rescue, and he’s far from the buff, studly, sophisticated Argylle but he gets the job done.

It turns out that Ellie is such a great writer that somehow, she has managed to predict with stunning accuracy in her novels what an actual spy agency is up to in her books, and they want her deep-sixed before she keeps blabbing away to her readers. Far-fetched? Yes. I could go into further detail but I’d ruin the movie for you and well, it does a good enough job of doing that on its own.

It’s a star studded cast. Samuel L. Jackson and Bryan Cranston stop by. Bryce, daughter of Ron “Opie” Howard, gets a chance to shine in her own vehicle. She does a better job in the first half as a mousy character but falls a little flat when she’s asked to be a bad ass. I’m not sure if it’s her or the written material she was given. Probably the latter.

Cut scenes throughout the first half of the movie refer to Ellie’s spy novels in which Cavill and Cena fight Dua Lipa and I couldn’t help but think how much more awesome the movie would have been if it had just been about Cavill and Cena fighting Dua Lipa than about Bryce Dallas Howard being in trouble for writing about Cavil and Cena fighting Dua Lipa. In true streaming movie fashion, it’s a lot of star power in that everyone was probably paid big bucks to show up for five minutes yet the trailer hoodwinks you into thinking they’ll be a huge part of the movie throughout.

So maybe just skip it and watch the trailer instead. Or wait until it streams on Apple Plus. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just not a good movie. It’s a C Plus movie. If you compare it to a term paper, its not the A plus paper that the honors kid stayed up every night for a month writing. It’s the paper the goof off kid wrote on the bus ride to school ten minutes before it was due. It got the job done but you can’t help but thing there was some wasted potential.

Sidenote. I hate to say this because I’ve whined extensively about my own weight problems on this fine blog, so I’m going to say this in a positive way. Bryce Dallas Howard is pleasantly plump and…you know what? She really isn’t. She just is for movies. She’s normal size for everywhere else. Most women in film, nay, most men in film for that matter, look like they eat three almonds a day and maybe, just maybe, if they’re good, they’re allowed one cup of spinach if they run a five mile marathon after. For example, I bet Dua Lipa only ate three celery sticks last year so she could film that cool scene where John Cena plucks her off her motorcycle that they put in the trailer that makes you want to buy a ticket to this otherwise lackluster film. But the Bryce-meister has a little bit of chub going on which works when she’s mousy novelist Ellie and a little surprising later as she tackles the a tougher kick ass role.

I’m not knocking it. I like curvy babes. It was nice to see a woman on screen who isn’t afraid of a sandwich. And I noticed the female lead in the beekeeper looked like she never shied away from the BK drive-through. There seems to be a trend in Hollywood as of late to put chubby chicks front and center and I applaud it. I’m just saying, where are the fat dudes? Where’s Special Agent Wayne Knight (Newman from Seinfeld) chasing down the bad guys? I’m not sure we’ll ever get equal time for portly dudes on screen, but there seems to be a cabal of chubby chicks who are doing a PR offensive to get husky babes on screen. Large dudes need their own PR team. All I’m saying.

Again. I’m fat. I applaud it. To an extent. Don’t get too fat, people. You don’t want the health problems that come with it. Trust me.

But Bryce is far from that. She and her cat are tres adorbs.

STATUS: Moderately shelf-worthy.

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Aug 04 2018
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review – Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018)

Hey 3.5 readers.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read this review.

This blog will self-destruct in…oh, who am I kidding?  This shit blew up a long time ago.

BQB here with a review of “Mission Impossible: Fallout.”

I went into this film thinking that this series was surely about to jump the shark.  Tom Cruise is 56 now, thus the only death defying actor who performs his own stunts that I know of who qualifies to receive an AARP card.

Sure, he’s preserved to a level that only a fortune built in La La Land can provide, but even so, I wondered if maybe it wasn’t time to hand this series to the next generation.

As it turns out, Tom’s still got the moves.  The plot is complicated, so much so that your eyes will go crossed if you actually try to follow it.  Honestly, sometimes I wonder if the writers of these films count on that.  In the theater, you’re sitting there, doing the mental calculations of what is transpiring in your head until….oh, wow!  Explosions!  Car chases! Fights!  Stunts!

While Tom’s still got it, I can’t help but notice Hollywood keeps insisting that he get a younger sidekick, i.e. Jeremy Renner in the previous film, or in this one, Henry Cavill of “Superman” fame.

Shit.  I wish I were Henry Cavill.  I’d get so much poon.  Damn it.  Why am I so ugly and yet this guy wakes up every morning, looks in the mirror and realizes he’s got a license to print snatch?

But I digress.

To the film’s credit, there’s a main plot device, i.e. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, despite a lifetime of espionage and intrigue, still maintains a moral compass.  He will never put a team mate in danger (Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames return as Ethan’s long suffering tech lackies, Rebecca Ferguson and Michelle Monaghan as his past and present love interests), even to keep a mission from failing.

Meanwhile, Cavill’s August Walker will gladly put a friendly down for the greater good.

That’s sure to make for a good international buddy cop drama.

The film centers around a plot in which various villains plan to set off nuclear bombs in the world’s holiest cities – Jerusalem, the Vatican and Mecca.  It will be up to Hunt and his crew to save the day.

One thing, and if you’re a fan of the series then it’s not really a spoiler, but as cheesy as the old “take a mask off to reveal another person” gag gets, it never ceases to amuse me.  I won’t give it away, other there was a point early on in the film where I thought the film was starting to look like it would be a dud, only for such a gag to happen, and make me realize it was actually going to be good…and it was.

A last thought.  For awhile now, I did think these films were fun throwaways, largely built around complicated plots that you forget and instead, you remember the stunts.  Instead, this film, and the last one, really do draw on a long, rich history, especially when you consider this series began in 1996…I freaking remember seeing it when I was in high school!

So Tom, I doubt you read this fine blog, though you should because you are missing out if you don’t, but I’ll just put this into the air – if you do only have one, maybe two of these films left in you, please make sure that they’re not only good but that they wrap up Ethan’s long life story.  Give him a happy ending, either he finally gets the girl and gets to relax, or he goes out doing what he was born to do – saving the world one last time.

Ethan might get his kicks hanging off of cliffs, but just don’t leave your longtime viewers hanging.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy.

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