"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015, R)

This film captured my interest from its first trailer; I liked the look of the action and the amusing dynamic between super-spy Colin Firth and his chav protégé as Firth showed him all sorts of awesomely fun spy gadgets.  The second major trailer I saw, in which super-spy Colin Firth lays waste to a bunch of lowlifes in a pub using nothing but a high-tech umbrella, clinched it.  I had to see this movie.

In Kingsman, tenacious hoodlum Eggsy is given the chance to vie for a place in an elite intelligence organization, old-school James Bond style with cool gizmos, slick fighting skills, and gentlemen’s manners.  He’s brought in by Firth’s Harry (code-named Galahad) as a potential replacement for a fallen agent.  All the current agents, as well as the other candidates for the open slot, are well-bred old-money types, so Eggsy sticks out like a Cockney sore thumb as he tries to prove himself just as worthy as his fellow competitors.  It’s a little bit underdog, a little bit Bond, a little bit stick-it-to-the-man class warring, and a whole lotta fun.

This is such a great, ridiculous movie.  Everything is cranked up to eleven – the insane spy-in-training assignments, the outrageous innuendos, the balls-out insane fight sequences, and the unflappable savoir-faire.  We’re talking weaponized signet rings, extinction-level diabolical master plans, and lethal prosthetics.  It also dusts the entire proceedings with a thick layer of tongue-in-cheek wryness.  This is the sort of film where the criminal mastermind serves the undercover super-spy McDonald’s on a (literal) silver platter and part of Eggsy’s spy training includes raising a pug.  Someone more well-verse in the genre could, I’m sure, point to numerous stylistic homages to its predecessors.  While I’m nowhere near the spy buff to catch the references, I can tell they’re there – some serious genre play going on here.

If I’d known going in that Kingsman’s source material, a comic book, is by the same guy who wrote Wanted, I wouldn’t have been so surprised by the violence.  With Matthew Vaughn (of X-Men:  First Class) at the helm instead of Timur Bekmambetov, the overall film is sleeker and less gritty, but both films have copious amounts of highly-stylized fighting, and when I said insane earlier, I meant it.  The choreography and direction of the fight scenes are jaw-dropping, for both their brilliant execution and their ludicrous audaciousness.  If they weren’t so comic-book over-the-top, I don’t know if I’d have been able to handle it, and even so, it just gets nuts.

Colin Firth is just the man in this movie.  He’s so amazing that they put the entire pub fight in the trailer and it’s just a glimpse of his coolness here.  He’s funny, dapper, sly, capable as all-get-out, and downright deadly.  I’m not familiar with Taron Egerton, who plays Eggsy, but he delivers a strong, likable lead performance, and the supporting cast is ably stocked with Michael Caine, Mark Strong (Mr. Knightley sighting!,) and Samuel L. Jackson, with a brief Jack Davenport appearance as a bonus.

Warnings

Heaps of the old ultraviolence, sexual content, language, general lawlessness, drinking/smoking, and megalomaniac morality.

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