Matthew Goode rarely is

This post contains spoilers for The King's Man, and possibly other films that will be determined as we go.

I don't believe the spoilers would be detrimental to your enjoyment of the film, and the premise of this post basically argues that they shouldn't really be spoilers anyway. Still, read on at your own peril.

I wonder if it was weird for Matthew Goode to possess movie star good looks and his fair share of acting ability, only to end up in Hollywood and always -- and I mean always -- get cast as villains.

They go to a lot of trouble in The King's Man, which I watched on Thursday night, to hide the fact that he's a villain. His character is seen about a half-dozen times -- always from behind (and once with a fencing mask on) to preserve the surprise of who this man is with the outrageous Scottish accent, pulling all the strings in World War I from behind the scenes. (Yes, this movie tackles World War I head on with the delight of an enthusiastic alternate historian, though I was surprised to learn afterward how much of it hypothetically could have been real.)

But who are we kidding? Once Goode was introduced as a minor innocuous character at the beginning, and then nothing was really done with him, it should have been obvious to anyone half paying attention that he was going to end up being the Big Bad. 

Because that's what Goode always -- and I mean always -- does.

As I am typing these words, I have only a general sense of how correct or how absolute this notion is. But I'm going to go through the films he's appeared in that I've seen, just to see how much his filmography bears this out. (I won't bother with the films I haven't seen, as this could subject me to spoilers -- though I should probably say there could be other spoilers ahead, so tread carefully. If you see a particular title come up, and you haven't seen the movie, you can just move past that one before you determine whether I decided he was, indeed, a villain in that film.)

Let's go chronologically. As it turns out I've been watching Goode at the movies for exactly 20 years, which gives this a nice little additional bit of relevance:

Chasing Liberty (2002) - Here is the sort of role Goode might have imagined he'd play his whole career, a handsome and charming love interest for the president's daughter, who is on the lam at a European music festival. It wasn't long after this before he went sinister, though.
Verdict: Not a villain

Match Point (2005) - Had to re-read the plot synopsis on this one. I thought Goode might have been sinister here but he appears to be more of a cuckold. Just being a priggish Brit doesn't mean you're a villain. 
Verdict: Not a villain

The Lookout (2007) - And Goode takes villainy by the teeth. In a pretty scenery-chewing performance if I remember correctly, Goode plays the smarmy leader of a team of would-be bank robbers who conscript the bank's janitor, a former hockey star with brain damage that affects his short-term memory (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to help rob the bank.
Verdict: Villain

Watchmen (2009) - Similar to in A King's Man, Goode's status as a villain is a late-film reveal, as for most of the time we just think he's one of the good (if underutilized) Watchmen. Nope. He wants to bring the world to its knees, just like the guy in A King's Man.
Verdict: Villain

A Single Man (2009) - Had to go to the plot synopsis on this one too. Turns out Goode plays the deceased lover of the main character, played by Colin Firth. He's remembered fondly but painfully by Firth's character following his death eight months earlier in a car accident.  
Verdict: Not a villain

Stoker (2013) - Hit up this plot synopsis as well despite remembering Goode's villainous ways in this one. Both a pervert (he tries to hit on his teenage niece) and a murderer in this one. 
Verdict: Villain

Belle (2013) - I'm just going to stop mentioning my visits to the Wikipedia plot synopses. Looks like Goode only has a small role in this one, the father of the main character, who gives her into the care of his uncle near the beginning of the film. Not for villainous reasons, though -- maybe for cowardly ones, but I don't really remember.
Verdict: Not a villain

The Imitation Game (2014) - "Great!" I thought. "Goode is almost certainly one of Alan Turing's professional rivals, or someone who wanted to out him!" Nope, just a cryptography colleague, it appears, whose name isn't mentioned very often in the synopsis.
Verdict: Not a villain

Self/less (2015) - So it appears Goode plays the scientist who pioneers the fundamentally unethical body-swapping procedure at the film's core, which just sounds like a villain thing to do, though to be honest, I barely remember this film. Also it's a bit complicated by the fact that part of the time he plays a vessel, which means it's someone else's personality piloting the body. But still ...
Verdict: Villain

Allied (2016) - Appears to be a smaller role of a man who was blinded in the war. A blind person can't be a villain unless it's Don't Breathe, or possibly Don't Breathe 2. 
Verdict: Not a villain

Downton Abbey (2019) - This is probably a good time to cover both of Goode's prominent TV roles on British period pieces -- that I've seen, anyway -- which are his role as Mary's race car driver love interest in Downton Abbey, and his role as Tony Armstrong-Jones on The Crown, where he really mistreats the queen's sister, Princess Margaret. He's lovely in the former and a definite villain in the latter. But in the case of the Downton Abbey movie the answer is ...
Verdict: Not a villain

The King's Man (2021) - As discussed.
Verdict: Villain

Overall verdict: Matthew Goode is not always -- always -- a villain.

However, being a villain in five of the dozen films in which I've seen him at least makes him pretty likely to be cast that way. It would be a higher percentage than most people. And therefore, I can justify the time I've just spent on this.

I suppose this is actually a compliment to Goode, in that when he's a villain, I really remember it. 

In the subject of this post, I used a little play on words, saying "Matthew Goode rarely is," implying the word "good" there. And in that use of "good," meaning it as a synonym for "kind" or "just" or "pious," and an antonym for "evil."

But Goode is definitely "good" in terms of his talent, in terms of what he brings to the screen. And that can be a chilling coldness that has its best times to shine when he's cast as an evil bastard eager to deceive, kill or maybe even molest you.

If Goode weren't so good in the times he's been cast as a villain, I probably wouldn't think there had been so many of them. 

Ghosts of movies past

It may surprise you to hear this, but Matthew McConaughey is actually a halfway decent actor.

When I first became consciously aware of The Shirtless One, it was while watching the John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill (1996). He delivers an absolutely knockout courtroom summation near the end, his face buckling believably under the emotion of the words he's speaking. Of course, I should have been aware of him from Dazed and Confused (1993), except it's such a different role that I didn't make the connection. His Wooderson is the classic archetype of the post-high school charming skeezeball. Then there's Reign of Fire (2002), where he's a post-apocalyptic commando with a shaved head, whose eyes burn with fire, and who chews scenery and spits it out with an awesome trashiness.

Unfortunately, Matthew McConaughey has also made 29 other movies.

And a heckuva lot of them are almost exactly like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

Forgive me if I make assumptions about a movie I haven't seen, but the repetitive nature of Mr. McConaughey's body of work just begs you to do that.

The second non-Christmas movie based on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol within the past year -- following the execrable Republican propaganda otherwise known as last October's An American Carol -- Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is Matthew McConaughey at his laziest. You might say "at his paycheckiest." The guy can do other things, he just chooses not to. And to think I criticized Brendan Fraser for sticking to his comfort zone.

Actually, the first ten years of his career were pretty promising, or at the very least, diverse. This is a guy who appeared in everything from The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994) to Amistad (1997). He's in several movies I really love, including Contact (1997) and Boys on the Side (1995), not to mention those listed at the start of this posting.

But it was right around the time of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003) that McConaughey decided to lose his career in ten movies. Okay, maybe "career" is not the right word, since he's clearly still very castable. How about "critical respect"?

Consider what has come since: Sahara (2005), Failure to Launch (2006 -- you could have a field day with that title), Fool's Gold (2008) and now Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Even occasional trips off the beaten path, like We are Marshall and a very funny appearance in Tropic Thunder, can't change the public impression of his downward trajectory into abject creative sloth. He liked what he tasted in EdTV (1999) and The Wedding Planner (2001), and those movies quickly became his standard, rather than his change of pace.

And there's just something about that oily, insincere, devil-may-care smirk on the posters that suggests he's pulling one over on us. And he knows it.

Matthew McConaughey is hardly the first actor to become excessively comfortable with his typecasting, and he certainly won't be the last. But I think the reason his current path is so dispiriting is that the character type is so essentially unlikeable. The charming and handsome lothario who won't commit? Really? Is there anything else we can possibly learn about this archetype?

I'm just hoping there's still something more we can learn about Matthew McConaughey. The actor's next announced project on IMDB is called Hammer Down, and it's projected for release in 2011. (I must say, I have a hard time believing he doesn't have at least three more brainless romantic comedies scheduled for release before then.) In Hammer Down, McConaughey plays a former NASCAR driver involved in a heist.

It's different, I'll give him that.

And that's really all I'm looking for.