Kingsman: The Secret Service

I knew I would dislike Kingsman: The Secret Service right from its first few seconds. The opening credits feature the type of wartime imagery that aims to be whimsical but comes off as mildly offensive because it makes light of serious subject matter without offering any context, commentary, perspective, or humor. Like the rest of this movie, the opening shot looks and plays more like a video game than a film. Kingsman tells the story of an apolitical, independent (though distinctly British) ultra-secret spy organization tasked with righting wrongs that can’t be handled by politically hamstrung national clandestine organizations. Modeled on the Knights of the Round Table by way of the 1960s era James Bond films, the Kingsmen recruit and train their new members via a rigorous program designed to weed out anyone who doesn’t have the specific brand of honor and integrity the organization requires. One of the latest initiates is our protagonist, an undisciplined, lower class street kid (Taron Egerton) championed by one of the Kingsmen’s finest agents (Colin Firth). 

The picture attempts to capture the spirit of the great British movie spies of yesteryear (not just Bond but George Smiley, Harry Palmer, Philip Kimberly, etc.) and update it for a modern audience. But while the basic ideas underlying the story do pay tribute to classic spy pictures, in terms of execution this is nothing more than a generic contemporary superhero movie. The Kingsmen are just X-Men in Saville Row suits instead of spandex. All members of the agency demonstrate superhuman capabilities—read minds, dodge bullets, and defy the laws of physics. Therefore we must sit through several bland CGI-enhanced action sequences—the type that made me quit going to this kind of movie a long time ago. Not surprisingly, the film is based on a comic book.  Disappointingly, Matthew Vaughn, who made two of the few recent comic-book superhero films I was able to tolerate before I gave up on the genre (Kick Ass and X-Men First Class), directs it. 

Though most of the casting choices are smart and the script manages one or two clever exchanges, there are more than a few cringe-worthy moments—several coming at key points in the story.  Vaughn clearly wants to draw a parallel between Firth’s grooming of Egerton and the way director Terrence Young transformed the young, unrefined Sean Connery into the ultimate icon of stylish, manly, sophistication in the first Bond movie Dr. No.  Trouble is, Egerton is no Sean Connery. He’s more like Shia LaBeouf.  Vaughn and his co-writers don’t even seem to understand their own meta dialogue. When they have their silly, non-threatening, utterly unfunny evil genius character (Samuel L. Jackson) claim that a genre movie is only as good as its villain, it demonstrates how completely Kingsman fails at everything it sets out to accomplish.