Review: ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’

“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.

In the meantime, the movie is also about some crazy worldwide plot from Mr. Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson with a lisp), who has a plan for thinning out the world population in an effort to save the planet from man made climate disaster. Mr. Valentine is a great example of how this movie takes the piss out of the classic spy movie bad guy. Mr. Valentine has many of the hallmarks of a typical movie villain – he has an insane lair, dug into a mountain and populated with tons of employees who MUST know they work for some evil guy, he has a highly efficient henchwoman (Sofia Boutella) who has a very unique physical characteristic setting her apart from the others, he has a huge plan that would affect the whole world and he seemingly has the infinite resources to make it happen. However, unlike the stereotypical movie villain, he certainly feels like he is doing the right thing 100% and as such doesn’t see himself as “taking over the world” or anything nefarious like that, and he actually hates violence, both carrying it out and witnessing it, and he takes no pleasure in chaos and murder at all.

Similarly, “Kingsman: The Secret Service” plays with the spy archetype in the same way. The first spy we get to see in real action is overly efficient himself, taking out a room full of bad guys effortlessly and managing to even strike bad ass poses with his gun during the fight. With his impeccable style of dress and perfect hair and radiant smile, he’s everything we would want from a real world James Bond, down to the quaffing of expensive whiskey and knowing the exact maker and year. He’s really an uber James Bond, which makes it that much more shocking when he death comes almost immediately, which then gets the plot going in earnest. Harry, meanwhile, is all manners in social situations, but when he has to get violent, he gets overly violent. Imagine if someone like James Bond existed in the real world and then some schmuck tried to pick a fight with him…how long would it take for Bond to do some serious, permanent physical damage, and how long until he breaks out one his crazy agency-supplied weapons to take out some drunk? Well Harry goes right for the knick knacks and tricks, content to inflict insane pain on people who simply talk shit to him at the wrong moment.

And it is not like the sending up of spy movies is subtle, or only in there for film scholars or anything like that. There are multiple scenes in this movie in which characters talk about spy pictures and the tropes in said pictures, and then they literally point out how this movie that they are in is not like those movies, and then they do something drastic that backs up their point. Maybe a little too on the nose, but still kind of fun.

Actually “fun” is the key word here, because “Kingsman: The Secret Service” is above all else a totally fun movie to watch. The action scenes are absolutely cookoo bananas bonkers crazy, and as the movie progresses these scenes get crazier and crazier. There are one-against-many fights, and all out brawls, and crazy shoot outs, and of course we now that the bad ass henchwoman with the blade feet will be Eggsy’s biggest physical challenge and that fight does not disappoint at all. Additionally this movie is funny. It has jokes from start to finish, and even ends on a big, irreverent joke, just to let the audience on its way out the door that this thing is not meant to be taken seriously at all, it is a crazy homage movie, straddling the line somewhere between spoof and satire, with just the right touch of pathos to try to keep things from spilling over into pure silliness.

“Kingsman: The Secret Service” is actually pretty great, definitely for people who can appreciate the source of the jokes, i.e. the spy movies of the past, but even beyond that, this is an absurd, humorous, awesome movie featuring great characters and a good share of wit, with just the slightest touch of wisdom thrown in for good measure.