Colin Firth and friends (Jaap Buitendijk/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)
Galahad (Colin Firth) recruits a new Lancelot to replace a fallen member of the service, and coincidentally receives an unexpected message from Eggsy (Taron Egerton), the roguish son of a former colleague. Kingsman: The Secret Service, adapted by director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) and Jane Goldman from a comic book, is a throwback to less serious, more improper spy movies of old times. It’s a fun action movie, and even at 129 minutes it doesn’t exactly get boring, But it does get conflicted; its conflict built into a central relationship between the sophisticated mentor and his mischievous young charge.
Kingsman is a very secret service that executes bloody, clandestine ops around the world in order to save it (and specific gentlemen in distress like an unrecognizable Mark Hamill as a professor gone missing). But it’s also a Savile Row tailor and a bawdy garage band, which may be apropos as well. As Galahad takes Eggsy to be fitted for a bespoke suit, the mentor gauges his apprentice on cinematic parallels to their relationship. Has he seen Trading Places? La Femme Nikita? No, but this urchin who has been taken off the streets in order to make something of himself has seen My Fair Lady. But the parallel only goes so far: Guidance in upper class diction presently replaced by the skill and authority to kill dozens of people.
It’s the kind of movie that’s best not to think about, and yet, there’s plenty to think about—and not all of it is unpleasant. Eggsy is put through a grueling series of tests in which his street smarts are up against smug competitors born, as Eggsy puts it, with a silver spoon up their bum (a particular fixation of which we have not yet heard the last). Natch, Eggsy‘s rough skills and helpful attitude generally trump prep-school know-how, and it’s suggested that Eggsy’s adolescent transgressions are the very thing that help him prepare for the service. As Galahad explains, “Manners make the man.” Eggsy just needs to learn manners.
He doesn’t, exactly, but he does learn style, and there’s plenty of it here. The action is not, as early reports claimed, up to the violent delirium of The Raid: Redemption, but fight scenes are shot better than most action movies—if you must have a stylistic gambit, better slow motion than incomprehensible motion. And how many action movies invoke Busby Berkeley in its colorful vision of an impending global descent into lawlessness?
Kingsman: The Secret Service is the cinematic equivalent of a good Rolling Stones cover band. The template here is the misogynist old school spy movie, its villainess Gazelle (Sofia Boutella) an evil land mermaid with razors for a tail (cf. Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror x 2), its damsel in distress promising to take it in the ass if the hero saves the world. They might as well have called a character Cunty Galore.
The movie seems complicit in its own villainy. Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) is a color-coordinated entrepreneur (I am partial to his orange outfit) who comes on like a cross between Russell Simmons and Steve Jobs. The timely villain offers free internet and phone service forever to anyone who lines up for his free SIM card, which on queue emits a frequency that turns humanity into homicidal freaks, as if we needed the help. Meanwhile, the film serves up vastly colorful ways to die a painful death. Cheers!
The movie’s old-school flair is dampened by the discouraging thought that, despite all of Galahad’s attempts to make a gentleman killer out of a street thug, he only got halfway there. Kingsman is still an enjoyable ride for gentlemen and rogues alike, though there’s really only room for the latter.
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Kingsman: The Secret Service
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book by Mark Milar and Dave Gibbons
With Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Samuel L. Jackson
Rated R for sequences of strong violence, language and some sexual content
Running time 129 minutes
Opens today at a theater near you.
