Streaming service Paramount+’s 2021 release Infinitehas elements of Fast & Furious, Doctor Strange, Bloodshot, Captain America: Winter Soldier, New Mutants, The Adjustment Bureau, and Mortal Kombat. Lots of tropes are blended into this expensive, giant, sci-fi action fantasy mash-up. Infinite isn’t as good as any of these movies, but if you subscribe to Paramount+ you’ll find worse ways to spend a few hours.
The biggest surprise is Infinite is not derived from an existing property like a video game or comic book. At the center is Mark Wahlberg as a man named Evan McCauley, raised to believe he was schizophrenic (a la Moon Knight) only to find he is part of a supernatural truth where 500 people have the power to recall their reincarnated pasts, and he’s one of them–only he doesn’t remember.
If you secretly wished the winner of the top spy contest in Kingsman: The Secret Service was Eggsy’s friend Roxy, you’ll get to see what that might have looked like in the new Mark Wahlberg supernatural thriller Infinite. The Kingsman’sSophie Cookson, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Doctor Strange, The Old Guard),Rupert Friend(Obi-Wan Kenobi), and the prolific Toby Jones(Captain America: The First Avenger, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Doctor Who, Snow White and The Huntsman, The Hunger Games) join the typically wise-cracking Bostonian Wahlberg in a different kind of search to uncover secrets. Tapping into the supernatural time travel trope, with hints of Assassin’s Creed and the secret spy league of The Adjustment Bureau, Infinite finds Wahlberg as a man with hallucinations that are actually a window into his past lives (a la reincarnation–remember Albert Brooks’ “past lives pavilion”?). Antoine Fuqua steps in to direct, hopefully conjuring some of that high-octane action he brought to the screen in his The Magnificent Seven remake, The Equalizer and The Equalizer 2, and Shooter.
First previewed here at borg in 2019, here’s the trailer for Infinite:Continue reading →
Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the sequel to the 2014 spy movie Kingsman: The Secret Service, is coming to the theaters in a few weeks. If you didn’t see the original, it was probably because of its rather uninspired title. But don’t wait any longer. Kingsman: The Secret Service is a blast. And it’s streaming right now. Kingsman: The Secret Service stars Colin Firth as a secret agent in a new brand of 007 series, as he attempts to recruit the next member of the Kingsman organization, the son of a former agent, played by Taron Egerton. It’s stylish. It’s wall-to-wall action. It’s part dark comedy. And its over-the-top violence is operatic and epic. The last time we had this much fun was watching Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live.
For those hoping Firth would ever be tapped as Bond, this is every bit that, only Firth’s master spy has moves like no Bond ever had. One scene provides so much hand-to-hand combat you’d think you were watching Kill Bill, and the Quentin Tarantino influence doesn’t stop there. You’d almost think the retired director was the ghost director behind the mayhem in the film’s climactic battle. It’s just as well, as actual director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Kick-Ass 2, X-Men: First Class, Layer Cake) proves again he knows the action genre.
Every great British spy story needs a Bond girl, and Sofia Boutella’s Gazelle is up there with the best. Her missing lower legs (no, we never learn why) were replaced with steel blades, blades that can kill–and very much do. Think of Bond girls played by Famke Janssen and Grace Jones, and Boutella fits right in. Every bit the combat equal to Firth and Egerton’s spies, Gazelle is practically a character missing from Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Continue reading →
