The theater was pretty well packed as G.I. Joe and I had to wait in line to see Kingsman: The Secret Service. Based on the previews I was expecting a rollicking, crazy time of action and adventure. And boy does it deliver.
Secret Agent Harry Hart (aka Galahad) owes his life to the father of street youth “Eggsy” – a remarkably clean, movie-ticket-sellingly attractive, and well-washed boy who lives in squalor with his mother and her abusive boyfriend. (Apparently no one else in the house uses the shower.) When Eggsy gets bailed out of prison by Harry, so begins his journey into the ultra secret service of the Kingsman. A group so clandestine, I’m not allowed to finish this senten….. Eggsy sees a way out of his current life and accepts the offer to join this group of incredibly talented spies via a deadly recruitment process that whittles 9 recruits down to just one with increasingly dangerous missions that kill off the weak.
I told you it was dangerous training.
Director Matthew Vaughn does a remarkable job of letting you know just how dangerous this universe is with multiple take-no-prisoner action sequences that show how insanely talented the Kingsman agents are – waltzing confidently into a room, dispatching everyone inside with blazing gusto, only to have themselves dispatched moments later in unexpected and gruesome fashion. The first scene of which has a sprightly, regal, and eloquent Kingsman twisting, turning, flipping himself all around, whilst the camera flips with equal grace as he shoots, bludgeons, and crushes every single person in the room. And then he, himself, gets cut in half. Yup.
Awfully well groomed.
The villain, the appropriately named Valentine (check the release date), played in marvelous lisping fashion by Samuel L. Jackson, is a sick and twisted billionaire with a great goal: solve global warming. Unfortunately his plan involves killing off huge amounts of the population of earth. He’s backed up by his deadly, attractive, and very intelligent sidekick Gazelle, so named because she can jump really high off her prosthetic bladed legs. You know how we refer to the prosthetic legs of amputee track runners as “blades”, well hers are blades in the truest sense of the word and she spends much time lopping people into pieces with her kicks. Actual pieces. Like… pieces.
You can imagine The Kingsman and Valentine are going to collide in big fashion. That Eggsy’s training will come into good use. And that the world probably will be saved. So let’s not talk more about the specifics of the plot because to do so will just ruin the fun. Know this – Kingsman: The Secret Service is an energetic, violent, inventive, bizarro film of extreme craft with plenty of crowd pleasing scenes and huge amounts of gallows humor. It does not skimp on going for the jugular and has some very dark moments, both in terms of humor and story content. Harry, tracking down Valentine’s evil plan, secretly enters a church whose pastor preaches hate and intolerance when all hell breaks loose. To tell you more would ruin the event. I wouldn’t be surprised though if the whole production crew just referred to this moment as “the scene.”
Evil – but for good reasons.
Valentine’s plan to clean up the world through mass death is punctuated wonderfully by his complete distaste for the sight of blood. He’s a study in opposites. A billionaire that eats McDonalds. His plan reaches to the highest levels of state, so Eggsy and his Kingsman trainer Merlin break into the secret villain lair and unleash an idea that we should have seen coming and probably many of you will. However, this movie is about execution (in every sense of the word). The grand finale, where they take out all the villainous inhabitants, can only be described as a twisted moment of pure dark comic genius. I REALLY wish I could say more. But in my wildest dreams of “seeing things coming” I never saw it play out in that fashion. Glorious and depraved. You deserve to be surprised.
Kingsman is beyond over the top, even sometimes going too far by pushing the depths of its humor into gross places, but the far flung attitude of going for broke is played with great zeal and the truly silly and funny spirit it deserves. It’s the kind of movie Shoot ‘Em Up tried to be before it forgot about humor and only cared about being over the top.
One other word of caution. G.I. Joe and I both had a great time but felt similarly that something was missing. That something prevented the movie from really kicking us in the stomach or making us cheer from exhausted joy. The extreme precision of the affairs makes the movie seem a little mechanical. It’s amazing to watch and superbly entertaining but lacks a certain extra amount of grit that jangles the nerves. See a movie like Equilibrium and by the time Christian Bale saves the dog you’ll want to stand up and shout. Or watch The Raid 2 and tell me you didn’t want to kick apart your house after the kitchen fight. Kingsman lacks that special ability to tie our emotions to the action. If you can handle hyper violent and hyper dark gallows humor, you’re in for a grand time. But it won’t cause you to have any sort of gut check that might take it right to the point of favorite thing ever.
That being said, I really had fun. At 129 minutes it plays like 129 minutes. You realize it’s long but you don’t care one bit.