Fooling with etiquette

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 2015)

I'm not attracted to anything in particular here and insofar as it moves fast it passes by without much incident, unless you're the type of viewer who in a silly film such as this likes to take umbrage by things like a pretty girl rewarding the world-saving hero with her body.
But that - a princess swooning over her savior knight and yet the scene promises quick sex on a couch and not romance - is part of the deliberate crudeness here, usually noted as irony and amounting to a simple fooling with some etiquette. Here the James Bond film but the supervillain is a lisping nerd, the suave spy maims and kills hundreds in a scene of frenzy etc.
It's such a small difference that I find no subversion in it and indeed quite the opposite, simple convention. This is a British attempt at a superhero comic book using the American language of spectacle to push out British stereotyped traditions in narrative.
So an opening scene of meddling in the Middle east only serves as generic stage to exalt British heroism. A super-secret society of gentlemen spies exists to steer the world into order, above MI6 - which as Brits know has merely been a junior partner of the CIA for decades, though we're not told in the film - and founded back in prewar days, that is in better days when Brits were still dominant. The established order is compromised and gentlemanly resourcefulness shines through it.
I'm not saying this from the viewpoint that it's harmful politics, it's fluff we will leave behind in no time, and only noting what gives rise to the image. Injecting adolescence in the tour and leaving the places visited the same. A Brit saves the world much like in James Bond fantasies - only he's a kid.
(There's an aerial scene here as the kids parachute from a plane, I collect aerial scenes of this sort because they reveal with some purity the aerodynamics of visual imagination in its flight, the gravity of a falling body in space, the currents of that space, the turbulence of camera paths. This one just pales by comparison to work being done on the American side; some exciting work can be seen in Jupiter Ascending).