All The Queen's Men

Rating:
Summary: Overall a good movie
Review: It depends on what you are expecting going in. A war thriller it is not, and not really a comedy in the sense that most people would think. If you are a fan of Eddie Izzard, you will love it. He is very funny in his role, and i would buy the DVD based solely on his musical number in the film.

Rating:
Summary: Just Bad... Really Bad
Review: Not a normal reviewer of movies, but after sitting through the entire film, felt the need to express in return for the money I spent.

This movie is bad from start to finish. For a comedy it is not funny, and as a war movie / drama it is fatally flawed. Starting with the opening scene in which the LeBlanc charachter plays an OSS officer who has his stolen Enigma machine destroyed by the Brits because they think it is a typewritter and it is not allowed to have German office supplies. Then they throw him in the British stockade because he bit a British officer. I can think of 40 different ways that you could have put LeBlancs' character with the Brits and this was not one of them.

Speaking of LeBlanc - he is AWFUL! He is still playing the same character from Lost in Space. Back to the story line. So then lets put his character behind enemy lines in Berlin where he does not speak German. Lets pretend he / she is Italian. Wait - he also does not speak Italian. Lets have the old Brit Sargent hide in the back of a car during a party - but never explain why or use his character through the whole scene.

Lets wrap it up with a clever escape from a German airfield. All of the planes scramble for some reason - including the transport planes. Not sure how a German transport plane can shoot down a B-17, but they were in a hurry to fly off with the fighters. There is one transport plane on the ground that the germans can start. LeBlanc over powers the crew and starts the plane right up. Only then when taking off do the Germans appear from the barracks to shoot at the plane while taking off. This of course after a 10 minite gun battle and explosions that they must have been sleeping through.

This film has no redeeming values, unless you like to hear Eddie Izzard sing in drag. It is just plain bad.

Rating:
Summary: Unconvincing and void...
Review: Take four British blokes, toss in one American, put them all in dresses, toss vigorously with a thin plot to infiltrate a female factory in WWII Germany to steal a secret machine called the "Enigma", and you have an excellent opportunity to entertain. Unfortunately, that opportunity was missed in this movie during their attempt at "Some like it Hot" humor. Had we seen a better transformation of the guys, or seen more than five minutes of it, it might have been more palatable, but not so. Eddie Izzard is the only highlight to this movie, who's job it is to transform three gruff-looking men into passable women to pull off their mission...a task he admits to failing several times in the film. I had to agree.
Buy this one to see Eddy, or listen to the flawlessly spoken German, or even because you're a fan of Matt LeBlanc, but don't buy it with the idea that you will watch it again and again, because you won't.

Rating:
Summary: Matt Leblanc in a Dress
Review: This German-Austrian-Hungarian-USA co-production was directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky and stars Matt Leblanc. The premise was that British and American agents during the Second World War tried to infiltrate the espionage mechanism in Berlin by disguising themselves in drag, in order to steal a precious Enigma encoding and decoding machine from an all-female factory. That was plausible enough (the image of Leblanc in a frumpy "German lady" dress aside), but I didn't hold much hopes of coming out of the movie satisfied. Well, I was disappointed, but in a good way. This is a breezy, entertaining, light-hearted action flick. How could one not like Udo Kier as a perverted Nazi general? How could one not love Eddie Izzard as the British drag queen who teaches his team the ropes of hair, makeup, and frocks?

Izzard, mostly known as a standup comedian, turned in a bravura performance, starting out with a hilarious rendition of Marlene, and ending with deceptively spirited performance of imperialist German favorites, which completely fooled and kept Izzard's Nazi audience enrapt while the espionage mission climaxed, literally right behind the stage curtains.

This film seems to have been made for American tastes, judging by how much of the humor content is directed toward stereotypes of British fuddy-duddiness and arrogance. It also suffers from a few plot implausibilities. The sixtyish Archie (played by veteran British character actor, James Cosmo) is a beefy, mustachioed walrus of a man who, even after shaving his face, couldn't pass for a woman plausibly no matter if he was all dowdied up in a head scarf and a charwoman's dress. Polyglot math genius Johnno Johnson--played by David Birkin, who some of you might recognize from his role as a "young" Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek:TNG episode where a handful of Enterprise crew are suddenly turned into twelve-year-olds--was sent off on this mission instead of being kept on home turf, where his linguistic and cryptographic abilities would be much more valuable. And finally, the escape sequence at the end requires suspension of disbelief, quite literally.

Still, these flaws seem minor when compared to the overall entertainment value of the movie. Izzard's performance as a whole, Cosmo's endearing takes as a "grandmother" to a German war orphan, and Leblanc's hilarious seduction of Kier highlight an overall very enjoyable 105 minutes.