“Kingsman: The Secret Service” is a delightful send up of the classic British spy genre, made famous worldwide by a series of films from the UK centered around some character called James Bond. You may have heard of him. This is like a James Bond movie but set in a world in which James Bond movies already exist and their tropes and conventions find their way into this world, only to be either a) subverted or b) amplified.
Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is a street punk, spending most of his time getting in trouble with his friends, drinking pints and just mostly wasting away his life. Through a series of events, he finds himself under the wing of Harry (Colin Firth), who is a member of a super secret, non-government affiliated agency, which is totally privatized and whose members have taken it upon themselves to keep the world safe from major calamities like political assassinations and dirty bombs and stuff like that. The first half of the movie or so is then about Eggsy’s attempts to join this service through a rather tough job interview, which is much closer to military boot camp than anything else. Here he competes against eight other hand selected people, all of whom want this incredible job for themselves.Continue Reading …