The Great Game
The first panoramic views of the trenches with the voiceover of The Shepherd, particularly the depiction of mountains of spent shell cases, are taken from real photographs of the Battle of The Somme. Fought between July and November 1916, with no clear winner, it cost the lives of around 700,000 British and French soldiers and 550,000 Germans. As shown, entire battalions were mowed down with machine gun fire and over one million shells were fired in the first week alone.,There is a brief flashback showing the death of Tsar Nicholas and his family, and while the scene has been painstakingly reconstructed down to the wallpaper of the basement, the family is shown being quickly killed with a single discharge of what appears to be a machine pistol by one person pretending to be a photographer. The real execution was far messier and cruel: the assassins tricked the family into posing for a photograph, but no camera was brought. Instead, the chief of the guards read a makeshift death sentence and then an entire squad entered the room. After the shooting, the Tsar, his wife and son had been killed, but the four daughters were still alive, due to the fact they had sewn jewels in their clothes, so the troops finished them off with bayonets and the butts of their rifles. Due to the gruesome nature of this, it is possible this is a deliberate alteration by the director.,Duke of Oxford: Reputation is what people think of you. Character is what you are.,Tom Hollander is credited as 'Tom Hollander³', as he plays three different characters.,Featured in The Oscars (2021),Matthew Cubed
Written by Dominic Lewis, Matthew Margeson and Matthew Vaughn
Published by MARV Music,I was very impressed with Matthew Vaughn's directing and writing in the first two films, of whom Jane Goldman also shared the writing credits, but in this one she was absent, and wow what a difference it made. In the ridiculously unnecessarily long 131 min runtime, only 10 mins total had anything to do with the Kingsmen. The rest was a convoluted scattershot of unnecessary plots that seemed to be a bunch of short films thrown in a blender to come up with this nonsense. There were too many plot and technical issues, and scenes that will make you shake your head in disbelief of what you're seeing, and why. Even the entire villain portion was too short, lame, and lazily written and executed. There were so many long dragged out and unnecessary scenes, you can literally fast-forward to the end of the scene and miss nothing of relevance. Basically 90% of this film was all filler with very little substance - and that's as a stand-alone film; as a prequel, it's all filler with maybe 2-3 minutes of any "Kingsmen" relevance. It's really too bad, because the rest of the film - cinematography, choreography, performances etc were all very good. I gave the first two films 9's, and I'm struggling to even give my very generous 6/10 for this one. Please include Goldman in any future Kingsmen films; at least her vision was coherent, cohesive, and exciting.,