Review of All The Queen`s Men

Introduction

Matt Le Blanc could be a man with a problem. After 10 years of being in one of the most popular sitcoms ever, he is known the world over as Joey Tribiani, lowbrow soap actor with a way with the women. While the fame and notoriety can only be welcome, and the pay cheque certainly won`t bite, moving on will be quite hard. Especially as of all the Friends, he is the most typecast. Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry and Courtney Cox have all had decent movie roles, and with The Good Girl, Jennifer Aniston has certainly established herself as a movie actress. For Matt Le Blanc though it appears that the transition has been harder, as he has had to pick roles which on the surface appear to be as non-Joey as possible. I`m afraid that I missed the simian baseball comedy, Ed and I may not be alone in that. However I did find Lost In Space enjoyable although, while from sitcom to space pilot may seem a drastic career move, it still took me much of the film to get over Joey in Space. All The Queen`s Men is another foray into cinema for Matt Le Blanc and this time he is a secret service agent, parachuted behind enemy lines in WWII to steal an Enigma machine, in drag. Typecast, I think not.

He`s not alone on his perilous mission. It`s late into the war and the pendulum has swung in the favour of the allies. Germany is on the back foot and all its able bodied men are on the front line. Only the women remain to support Germany`s infrastructure and work in her factories. An ambitious plan is drawn up to insert a team of soldiers behind enemy lines to infiltrate the factory where the Enigma decoder is manufactured, and to steal one. The only snag is that they will have to go in undercover, as women. Steven O`Rourke is a top agent in the OSS and he has almost completed several hazardous missions, once even coming close to retrieving an Enigma machine single-handed, but this time he is ordered to join a team consisting of Archie a timid army clerk, Johnno a cryptology prodigy and Tony, the cabaret transvestite whose job it is to mould these proud allied soldiers into women of the third Reich. The mission falls apart as soon as they land and it`s only when the team encounter their contact, Romy that O`Rourke has a chance to finally succeed in a mission.

Video

Don`t believe the packaging it`s not a 4:3 picture. On the contrary, All The Queen`s Men boasts and impressive 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer that is textbook . There is absolutely no print damage and the transfer is pixel perfect. The picture is pin sharp and crystal clear throughout, with a colour palette chosen to reflect the forties period. Some impressive CGI work portraying a war torn Berlin under intermittent bombing raids belie the small-scale nature of the live action. The smallish cast and restrictive sets only rarely jar with the expansive special effects and on the whole the film succeeds in feeling bigger than its budget. I also love the title sequence, it is a charming rectangular motif that harks straight back to sixties caper movies and it`s very well accomplished. The disc is coded Region 0.

Audio

The sound on the other hand is a rather disappointing DD 2.0 Stereo mix. It`s still fairly dynamic and has good separation, but given the fact that it`s a recent film with some action and derring-do then a DD 5.1 track would be the least requirement for this disc.

Features

This disc has interviews with the cast and crew presented in a 4:3 format. This totals some 12 minutes of footage and consists mostly of sound bites. Eddie Izzard takes the opportunity to show his particular brand of humour.

There is also some 3 minutes of B roll footage showing the rugby match and some action in the Enigma factory.

There is also a distinct lack of subtitles on this disc, which would have been helpful during the German dialogue.

The sleeve is also strewn with errors (well 3 errors). As well as the erroneous screen ratio, the running time is incorrectly states at 123 minutes, it`s actually 97, and James Cosmo`s character is described as an aging disc jockey, which had me imagining Tony Blackburn being parachuted over Berlin, it`s actually desk jockey.

Conclusion

This is one of those films that don`t really fit well into a genre. Ostensibly a comedy, it`s unconventional to say the least, and certainly doesn`t go the expected direction that you would expect from a film where the subject is soldiers in drag. Indeed the subject matter is treated with a degree of seriousness and there is no attempt to make light of the war. The laughs when they do come are often unexpected and even a little out of place. A typical comedy would have dwelt on the team`s induction into transvestitism and their subsequent training, the mission would have been tacked on as an afterthought, but All The Queen`s Men cuts straight to the chase.

The characters are all wryly observed and are well portrayed by the cast. Matt Le Blanc is dependable as O`Rourke and if the sight of him in drag won`t push the character of Joey from the minds of the audience, nothing will. He doesn`t make a pretty woman by the way, but that really isn`t the point of the story. James Cosmo has quite a touching role as the bumbling, order obsessed Archie and David Birkin is good as Johnno, but the film is truly Eddie Izzard`s. He plays the `bisexual lesbian in a man`s body` Tony and brings an honesty and truth to the part. Udo Kier also appears as a camp German General and is hilarious in the role.

What this film does very well is work with the characters and lets the comedy flow naturally from them. This is helped in good part by the screenplay written by David Schneider (who appeared regularly as `Zero Talent` on a late eighties comedy sketch show). However the script also attempts to be honest and forthright about wartime culture, especially the way it treated those on the outskirts of `acceptable society`. It also tries to be similarly forthright about how war affected the combatants. What results isn`t so much a dark comedy as a comedy that balances uncomfortably against a drama. While this film often made me laugh, it was uneasy laughter.

Also slightly problematic is the lack of drama and tension throughout. While the protagonists are constantly getting into scrapes and shenanigans, little of the excitement comes through to the viewer, except for the last fifteen minutes or so.

On the whole I found All The Queen`s Men to be quite fun. It`s a little bit funny, a little bit exciting and it looks great. It`s a different sort of film than what you would usually get from Hollywood and it`s obviously made for a more European audience. If you`re in the mood for something different it`s well worth a rent.

If you are tempted into buying it though, you should be aware of your options. There is a Region 2 specific release available on import from Germany of all places. This is a two disc special edition, with the feature, a making of, audio commentary (presumably in German), behind the Scenes material, interview, photo gallery, and trailer on one disc and a director`s cut of the film on a second disc. More importantly, as well as German soundtracks and subtitles, the English soundtrack is a DD 5.1 track. Unfortunately there`s always a niggling flaw and from what I can ascertain, the screen ratio is a cropped 1.78:1.