Not only is Kingsman: The Secret Service a secret agent movie, it’s a secret agent movie about suave, well-dressed, British secret agents—so it’s treading on some pretty well worn ground. Add in the fact that these fashionable spies use a variety of high tech gadgets in their work, they battle silly, cartoon villains, and they have a series of sprawling though hidden secret bases, and one begins to wonder what this new film could possibly have to offer that we haven’t already gotten from the countless James Bond movies that have been released since the early 60s. Well, while it’s true that Kingsman is definitely a very self-aware take on the Bond franchise, it’s also crasser, more overtly comedic, and more exploitively violent than most of what we’ve gotten from 007 over the years, which keeps things just fresh enough.
The hero of the story is a young man from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks named Eggsy (Taron Egerton). Though he’s smart and athletic and probably has a lot of potential, living life in a crime-riddled neighborhood with only a single mother to watch out for him has recently seen him making poor life decisions. A chance to turn it all around comes when he gets pegged to possibly become a Kingsman though. You see, his father was once a part of the organization, but died in the line of duty, so they feel like they owe the kid a favor, and seeing as they’ve just experienced their latest casualty thanks to a conflict with a megalomaniacal captain of industry (Samuel L. Jackson), the best way to do that is to add him to the highly capable group of young people who have been recruited to compete to be his replacement. Eggsy’s goals, then, are to earn his place as the newest Kingsman, help his new mentors in the agency (Colin Firth and Mark Strong) foil the plans of their dangerous new adversary, and prove to movie audiences all over the world that him doing so is an entertaining enough proposition for this origin story to launch a successful new franchise (presumably).
The film gets off to a good start toward accomplishing that last goal by immediately setting an irreverent tone during the opening credits. The sequence features loud music, loud explosions, and rubble that morphs into the names of the cast and crew, and it makes for probably the most entertaining start to a big blockbuster-type movie since Guardians of the Galaxy’s instantly iconic title card. From that point on, the film introduces us to a lady with killer knife legs, dudes doing hardcore parkour, exploding heads, kung-fu Colin Firth, and about a million other ridiculous things. There’s a danger when you mix this much irreverence and this many cartoon physics into an action movie, because the separation from reality and the lack of serious stakes that come from that break can eventually turn the action into punishing white noise, but this movie never gets to that point. It brushes up against the line a time or two, but never crosses it, so it ends up being a pretty good time.
In addition to the big action and the dark humor that comes along with the pseudo-spoofing of the spy genre, Kingsman features a handful of solid performances too. Egerton is probably not known by many, so he’s the big question mark here, but he’s charismatic enough that—even with a large scale movie like this set on his shoulders—he doesn’t buckle under the pressure. He kind of reminded me of a less dour, more British Jeremy Renner, but maybe that’s just because he’s short and blonde and doing karate.
Firth is predictably great as the main mentor figure, because he’s always great in everything, but what came as something of a surprise is how much of a chance he gets to engage in sprawling fight scenes, and how effective he is while kicking and punching. News flash: Firth is a secret badass. Jackson is completely cloying and terrible as the lisping villain, but seeing as he’s in the sort of movie where the villain is supposed to be cloying and terrible, he fits like a hand in a glove and ends up being a lot of fun to watch. Mark Hamill also makes an impression in a smaller role where he gets to try out an English accent. It’s great. The guy’s years working as a voice actor have really paid off.
The only real problems with the film come from hiccups in the storytelling. There’s really nothing that connects the scheming villain and auditioning young spy plots for a good chunk of the narrative, so the constant cutting back and forth between the two gets jarring—especially because you don’t really have any context for what Jackson’s character has planned or what he’s doing until you get halfway through the film. You get all wrapped up in this young kid’s story, his attempt at making something out of himself, and then you keep getting interrupted by Jackson and his knife leg-wielding henchwoman chewing scenery and speaking gibberish, just so there can be an obligatory big fight with a bad guy in the third act. The villain’s scheme comes with a boatload of plot holes and impossible coincidences that need to be explained away as well, and the explanations provided really only serve to shine a spotlight on the fact that the holes existed in the first place. Overall, Kingsman would have benefitted from being much simpler in its plotting, even if the ridiculousness of the villains’ elaborate machinations was likely an homage to classic Bond. There’s also some Meta talk about spy movie conventions that annoys, but let’s not sit here and nitpick.
The bottom line is that director Matthew Vaughn has managed to mix the large scale action set pieces of his work on X-Men: First Class with the dark humor of his work on Kick-Ass, and the results are one of the first movies of 2015 that truly satisfies. Whatever problems might exist in the Kingsman script, this is still a movie that allows Colin Firth an opportunity to cut loose with martial arts and gunplay, killing dozens and dozens of people in some of the most brutal, unnecessarily violent ways imaginable, and it’s impossible not to feel at least a little bit of fondness for that. This movie is full of fun action scenes that are shot and edited well, and even though it has to go for the huge, massively destructive, world-ending finale that all studio movies seem legally required to include these days, it also manages to find ways to keep the stakes personal to the characters, which makes it easy for us to stay emotionally involved. There’s a bit with a baby locked in a bathroom during the third act that could serve as a lesson to a lot of the blockbuster directors working today in how to insert humanity into an effects-heavy finale. This is the kind of stuff that people like Steven Spielberg used to be great at, and it’s nice to see that there are still filmmakers working who can pull it off.
