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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