NOTE: This review contains some SPOILERS.
Kingsman: The Secret Service is
a nasty, hateful poison pill of a movie wrapped in delicious candy coating. That
candy coating includes not only cool, colorful, slick, budget-stretching
production design, but also knowing nods to an encyclopedia’s worth of past spy
movies and TV. For these reasons, it’s safe to assume that it might appeal
greatly to readers of this blog and spy fans in general… but ultimately that
appeal will depend on the spy fan’s individual tolerance for truly excessive
violence, gleeful and graphic slaughter of innocent people, on-screen murder of
world leaders played for laughs, and pervasive misanthropy. While I was
genuinely torn, for me, sadly, the latter ultimately kept me from enjoying the
former. As a self-confessed aficionado of the teen spy subgenre to which this
movie belongs and someone who enjoys James Bond imitators almost as much as James Bond movies, and as an avowed fan of director Matthew Vaughn (
X-Men: FirstClass), I really, really wanted to love
Kingsman. I was greatly looking forward
to it. But I’m afraid it comes off as my first major letdown of 2015.
Based on the comic book
The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons,
Kingsman tells the story of Eggsy
(Taron Egerton), a working class teenage London street punk whose life is
transformed when he’s recruited by Harry Hart (Colin Firth), a British spy of impeccable
breeding and John Steed-like class and sophistication, and trained to be a
gentleman and a spy. It’s a
My Fair Lady story (acknowledged in one of the
movie’s funniest exchanges), a teen agent in training story, and a paranoid global
conspiracy story all in one. Eggsy’s father was a Kingsman candidate killed
while saving Harry’s life in the movie’s opening moments. For that, Harry feels
a sense of debt, and promises the late agent’s widow and young son one favor in
their moment of need. Eggsy’s moment of need comes years later, when he’s in
jail for stealing a car and needs a way out. Harry not only offers him that way
out, but offers him a new future following in his father’s footsteps.
During the first half of the movie
we follow Eggsy’s
Alex Rider-style training as part of a group of cadets
competing for the single spot on the Kingsman roster, while Harry pursues a
mysterious threat that leads to celebrity kidnappings, sudden outbursts of
extreme violence from ordinarily peaceful people and exploding heads. (There
are a lot of exploding heads in this movie. If that’s not your thing, stay
away.) And ultimately, probably, the annihilation of all life on earth outside of
the proverbial Ivory Tower. The man behind this threat is social media mogul Richmond
Valentine (a lisping Samuel L. Jackson in full over-the-top mode). In the
second half of the movie Eggsy ends up with a mission of his own, and of course
finds himself using his training to take on Valentine.
The candy coating I mentioned
really is delicious stuff. It’s lots of fun to spot the spy references. I won’t
itemize them all here because that would be a bigger spoiler than anything I
could say about the plot, but they range from broad tropes of the genre (which
the film attempts to both celebrate and subvert at once) to specific details
from Bond movies or classic TV shows like The Avengers or Get Smart. The best ones manage clever new twists
upon the tried and true. It was a brilliant idea, for example, to relocate The
Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s tailor shop entrance to the secret spy headquarters to
Savile Row. What could be more classically spy than entering the office through
a Savile Row tailor?
Even better than the references
are the performances. There is a lot of strong acting talent in
Kingsman.
Egerton is all charm and makes an easy to root for protagonist; I look forward
to seeing where his career goes from here. I find Mark Strong (
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) infinitely more enjoyable as a good guy than a bad guy, so it’s
nice to see the former ubiquitous villain following up his scene-stealing turn
in
The Imitation Game with another savory spy role. Edward Holcroft (
London Spy) makes a good impression as a sneering fellow cadet. Jack Davenport and Mark Hamill have entertaining cameos. And Michael Caine is
Michael Caine! But
the performance of this movie is Colin Firth’s. The role of
Harry Hart (changed in a stroke of genius from the comic’s Bond-inspired “Jack
London” to a more original Steed-inspired part) is
Kingsman’s best creation, and
Firth inhabits it brilliantly. Good as Egerton is, I couldn’t help but wish
that the whole movie was about Harry Hart, and that there would be a long
series of others to follow! Firth combines Patrick Macnee’s refined wit and
sophistication with Daniel Craig’s brutality in what really might be the
ultimate British gentleman spy role. Sadly, there is ultimately too little of
Firth in the movie, and
Kingsman suffers for it.
Then there are the trappings.
Kingsman gets the trappings just right for the most part. There’s gadgetry
galore, and Vaughn demonstrates how to handle spy gadgetry in the modern age.
Some Bond screenwriters have gone on record saying that there’s not much you
can do with gadgets in an era when we all have amazing smartphones in our
pockets, but Kingsman makes a good joke out of that. When Harry first shows
Eggsy the room full of meticulously organized Kingsman gadgetry, the teen takes
in the pens and shoes and gold cigarette lighters—all with secret lethal
functions—and then his eyes land on a wall of cell phones. “What do those do?”
he asks. “Nothing,” says Harry. “That technology has caught up with the spy
world.” So it has, but that doesn’t diminish the coolness of a good old
fashioned poison pen!
There’s impressive production design,
including the immaculate tailor shop and Kingsman headquarters, a secret subway
from London to the countryside, and an airplane hangar and landing strip built
inside a mountain. There’s even more impressive clothing, thanks to costume
designer Adrianne Phillips (
Knight and Day). Men’s fashions haven’t looked this
good on screen since the Sixties. And there’s
a great spy score full of
Barry-esque horns and a strong theme courtesy of composers Henry Jackman and
Matthew Margeson.
All that candy coating crumbles
away upon closer inspection though. The sets, though initially impressive, show
at the seams. The score is great, but too often it’s ignored for key
sequences in favor of uninspired pop songs. The giant spaces are too obviously
digital, lacking the grandeur of those cavernous Ken Adam physical sets. Even
Eggsy’s epic third act shootout in the villain’s lair loses some of its luster
when you realize he’s just running through the same white hallway set again and
again. Maybe that, too, is a reference—a nod to the Eurospy movies and
PovertyRow spy pictures of the Sixties that somehow maintained a shabby dignity in
their attempts to achieve Bondian spectacle when they had to use
curtains to stand in for walls—but I doubt it.
Like the sets, when you see past
the spectacle, the movie itself loses a significant amount of its luster.
Vaughn again and again promised in interviews a return to the sense of fun that
modern spy movies have lost since the Sixties. But he doesn’t deliver. Kingsman
doesn’t convey the sense of fun of a Sixties Bond movie. It’s far too
misanthropic for that.
Rather than tantalizing us with
the horrifying prospect of sadistic violence, as Goldfinger did when Bond came
within inches of being sliced in half by a laser, Kingsman indulges that
violence. Valentine’s henchwoman, Gazelle (dancer Sofia Boutella) has
razor-sharp prosthetics for legs. That’s kind of a cool deformity/weapon, like
we might have seen in Bonds of old, but Vaughn can’t resist wallowing in the
violence of the weapons. Kingsman doesn’t stop at the prospect of a person
being sliced in half; it gleefully slices them before our eyes, delighting in
the shoddy digital effect of two halves of a severed body splitting.
With
Kick-Ass, Vaughn and
co-writer Jane Goldman cut out a lot of Millar’s mean-spirited violence,
creating a movie that was far more fun than its unpleasant source material, but
in
Kingsman they wallow in Millar’s misanthropic excesses. This is a movie
where a character with a vomit-inducing aversion to bloodletting is destined to
be brutally impaled and then vomit at the sight of his or her own blood while expiring.
Perhaps you find such an image as funny as Vaughn seems to, but it’s not
something that screams “the fun of Sixties Bond movies!” to me. And lest I come
off as squeamish, let me state that I am no prude when it comes to screen
violence. I’m an ardent Tarantino admirer, and I like my horror movies as gory
as possible. But gore has a place in horror that I don’t think it has in a Bond-type
movie. I find Milton Krest’s exploding head in
Licence to Kill to be a step too
far for 007 (or even Imitation 007), and
Kingsman is full of exploding heads.
Like
The Interview, it even explodes the heads of sitting world leaders,
including President Obama and the Royal Family. I found this
rather tasteless
in
The Interview (even with a dictator!), and I find it tasteless again in
Kingsman.
The deaths of world leaders
comes in keeping with Kingsman’s confused anarchic politics. There’s a reason
that the Kingsman organization, despite being so obviously British in every way
(right down to its name), is not tied to any one government. (In the comic it
was MI6.) That’s because Vaughn and Goldman want to tap into a prevailing mistrust
of governments in general… though they don’t seem to know why. (Or at least
they don’t share that with the audience on screen.) Where Bond is for Queen and
Country, Eggsy ends up fighting that system—and even facilitating the death of
that Queen 007 would lay down his life for.
Like all the best British spy
stories (and, well, pretty much all British fiction in general), Kingsman is
obsessed with class and the British class system. Unlike the works of masters
like John le Carré, Len Deighton and Graham Greene (whose The Human Factor may
contain the best class commentary in all spy fiction), Kingsman doesn’t seem to
know what it’s saying about class though. Eggsy finds himself competing with a
bunch of snobby Etonian types for a spot on the roster of the ultra-secret,
non-governmental spy agency, and we certainly side with him against their
class-based bullying. His own trajectory is to become a sophisticated gentleman
and prove that a man can defy his origins and achieve class status without the
prerequisite birthright, yet the head of the snobbish Kingsmen opposed to his
progress is played by Michael Caine, spydom’s leading working class hero, who
seems to betray similar origins to Eggsy in a crucial cockney slip.
Like John Steed, Firth’s Harry
Hart is the epitome of class and breeding, yet he is the one who believes
steadfastly in Eggsy. In its macro plot, Kingsman espouses full-on class
warfare, essentially advocating the slaughter of the One Percent (lest they
slaughter the masses), yet in its micro arc Eggsy’s personal growth is
demonstrated by his rejection of his roots and adoption of Harry’s exquisitely
tailored upper-class ways. The politics of Kingsman are more The Spook Who Sat
By the Door than The Spy Who Loved Me, but unlike that revolutionary classic,
Kingsman doesn’t convincingly portray social ills in need of such drastic countermeasures. The upshot is offensive to liberal and conservative alike, but not in a biting
satirical way. In fact, despite seeming to want to be political, it’s really
just crass. Because the enemy to Vaughn isn’t so much the upper class as
humanity itself. And when Harry, the movie’s most likeable character, is
written into a situation where he must use his previously cool fighting prowess
to brutally slaughter a church full of unarmed civilians (racist, hateful
civilians, in a slight attempt to make the scene more palatable than in the comic,
but civilians nonetheless), that’s when the movie loses me.
Kingsman: The Secret Service is
a contradiction. Part of it is pure, reference-loaded spy fun, and part of it
is hopelessly misguided and terminally half-baked social commentary soaked in
far too much blood and viscera for me to find enjoyable. Harry Hart is perhaps
the best new spy hero since Steed himself, but stuck in a movie that misuses
him. But I will enjoy those trappings. I will buy
the soundtrack and revisit
its terrific spy score frequently. I will even download the surprisingly
hummable Take That
theme song, “Get Ready for It.” And if I could afford them,
I would also buy the
Kingsman suits and cravats from the
Mr. Porter menswear tie-in. But I probably won’t find myself revisiting the film itself too
frequently. It’s just not as fun as the sum of its parts.
