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Director Matthew Vaughan and Comic Book writer Mark Millar team up again after the success of Kick-Ass to spin a James Bond-style Secret Agent yarn, adapted from Millar’s comic The Secret Service.
Sounds like a promising prospect but its implementation is severely flawed.
Let’s focus on the good bits first.
The idea of the Kingsman organisation itself is a sound idea, unclaimed inheritance money being used to finance a special agency dealing with crime and corruption. The protagonist, Eggsy (Taron Egerton), a Millwall fan who rebels against authority with a mum who gets beaten up by her gangster boyfriend is a likeable character compared to his bourgeois rivals who are also vying to be Kingsmen.
Colin Firth is outstanding as Agent Galahad. Half the role is the standard gentleman you would expect of Firth. The other half is some kick-ass action that sees him beating up more people than all his previous films combined. He could easily do a Liam Neeson after this and churn out film after film with this new action persona.
All action scenes are splendidly filmed. You see everything that is going on unlike in a Michael Bay movie. Each action feels satisfyingly lengthy and man, they are bone-crunching.
The only problem is that they held back on the blood to make it a 15. There is some, but for a film clearly aiming for realism it feels like a cop out when someone gets chopped in half and they separate like two slabs of cooked meat.
It feels like a progression of the fight scenes in Edgar Wright’s World’s End, where the camera perfectly compliments the action on screen, maximizing impact. It shows Matthew Vaughan at the peak of his powers and one of the very best at action films. It is great that this technique is used in a British film too.
The anti-capitalist sentiment in the plot is admirable but undermined by two insertions of horrendous and unnecessary product placement. And this is where things start going bad.
It’s bad enough that a portion of the film is devoted to McDonalds and making a joke about having a “happy meal”; but when the best character in the film (Firth’s Galahad) has front pages of filthy tabloid The Sun daubed across his wall, it is beyond reproach.
This Evertonian reviewer nearly walked out in disgust and it is imaginable that many Liverpool fans would be enraged at the choice of newspaper used for that scene.
Considering the left-wing angle of the plot, why couldn’t they have used the Guardian or just cut out the grotesque red top signage?
It ruins what could have been a great film, bowing to the owners of 20th Century Fox to include its newspaper and Sky News. The Sun has even tweeted that it has a starring role in the film.
*Reviewer goes off to projectile vomit…
…aah that’s better.
The score by Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson (both Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) is ubiquitous and feels the need to accompany the slightest thing with melodramatic orchestral movements. Then during action scenes, what is becoming the now-standard Marvel-esque action theme kicks in just in case you weren’t sure if something exciting was happening. Annoying.
Another strange thing about this film is how it’s been mis-marketed in the trailers as a kids film when it is far from it. All characters swear their heads off, even the supposed gentlemen Kingsmen. There’s too much violence for any child to which questions why they have marketed this to be like Spy Kids. The way film trailers are going, there isn’t much point watching them anymore. Just read the synopsis on IMDB instead.
It probably isn’t going to be the worst film of the year, but is easily Matthew Vaughan’s poorest.
Hopefully this is just a little stutter step and the next one will not show signs of an ongoing Faustian pact.