All the Queen's Men

All the Queen's Men is a 2001 English-language German-Austrian action comedy war film directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky and starring Matt LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard. Made on a budget of $15 million, the film received mixed reviews from critics, and it earned only $23,662 in the United States. In the years that have passed All The Queen's Men has become a Cult Favourite.

All the Queen's Men
Directed byStefan Ruzowitzky
Produced by
Written byDavid Schneider
Starring
Music by
  • Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen
  • Robert Folk
  • Michael Lloyd
Cinematography
  • Peter Kappel
  • Wedigo von Schultzendorff
Edited by
  • Rudi Heinen
  • Nick Moore
  • Britta Nahler
  • Andrea Schumacher
Production
company
Streamline
Distributed byStrand Releasing
Release date
  • October 14, 2001 (2001-10-14) (U.S. Mill Valley Film Festival)
  • October 25, 2002 (2002-10-25) (limited)
  • December 13, 2001 (2001-12-13) (Germany)
  • June 7, 2002 (2002-06-07) (Austria)
Running time
100 minutes
CountryGermany / Austria
LanguageEnglish
Budget$15 million[1]
Box office$23,662

Plot

During World War II the British army is attempting to retrieve an Enigma machine from Germany. Having failed in previous attempts, they decide to send four men undercover to the factory that makes the devices in Berlin. Unfortunately the factory is populated entirely by women, and they only have men to send. American O'Rourke (LeBlanc), British transvestite Tony Parker (Izzard), genius Johnno (David Birkin), and the reluctant Archie (James Cosmo) are sent to infiltrate the factory dressed as women.

Dropped in the wrong area, the team must first try to find their bearings. Aided by Romy, a sympathiser to their cause, they find their way to the factory. They manage to retrieve the Enigma machine, against the expectations of the British army. Just before they leave Germany, they realize they were tricked—the British government already had the device, but wanted to make the Germans think they were still after it. They were specifically chosen as the team most likely to fail. Leaving Germany with an Enigma machine would, in fact, destroy the usefulness of the machine, as the Germans would know it was stolen and switch to a different code system. Archie volunteers to be captured with the machine to allow the mission to "fail". After he is captured, the team retrieves him and returns safely to England, leaving the Germans with the impression they have all the Enigma machines and the British are still desperate to obtain one.

Cast

Reception

The film was panned by critics. Roger Ebert mentioned the film in his book Your Movie Sucks, terming it "a perfectly good idea for a comedy, but it just plain doesn't work." Ebert also mentions the problem with the plot being about retrieving an Enigma machine when "Anyone who has seen Enigma, U-571, or the various TV documentaries...will be aware that by the time of the movie, the British already had possession of an Enigma machine... The movie has an answer to it, but it comes so late in the film that although it makes sense technically, the damage has already been done."[2]

gollark: Maybe someone will make magic everything-producing nanofabricators at some point, but *now* we don't have that and everything has to come out of very complex supply chains involving many large factories.
gollark: You do actually need big nonlocal things to get economies of scale so we can have nice things like any advanced technology whatsoever.
gollark: It's not "weird mesh [REDACTED]". It's just a point to point link. You configure the allowed IPs on each end.
gollark: You can't really *know* if a provider has logs or not.
gollark: (*all* recent x86 CPUs have hardware crypto so you don't need much CPU power)

See also

References
  1. The Numbers - Movie Budgets
  2. Ebert, Roger (2007). Your Movie Sucks (1st ed.). Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Pub., LLC. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-7407-6366-3.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.