Those Scots, ya gotta love 'em. And I confess I love Mark Millar, the prolific and rather unhinged comic book mastermind who's authored everything from Civil War to Wanted to Kick-Ass. He has a cinematic style that's over the top, putting it mildly. He's also got a deep breadth of fond knowledge of the spy genre, so a movie like Kingsman: The Secret Service was inevitable. That it attracted a director of Matthew Vaughn's sensibilities might just be serendipity.
Going in, you should know that Kingsman is first and foremost two things - incredibly funny, and possibly the most violent film you can imagine. You're going to have to get some peanut butter on your chocolate, and that peanut butter - it's chunky.
Taron Egerton is Gary "Eggsy" Unwin, an orphaned London street tough who finds himself recruited by a beyond-secret group of British agents - The Kingsmen. Harry Hart (Colin Firth) might just as well be called John Steed - impeccably attired, Firth is the epitome of the English Gentleman spy, whose posh exterior belies the fact that he's a lethal master of combat that might cause James Bond to raise an eyebrow. Feeling a debt is owed, Harry recruits Eggsy as a candidate Kingsman - one of several young protégées who must vie for a job opening in a fantastic series of increasingly dangerous tests to see who's the last one standing. Meanwhile, a tech billionaire uber-villain (Thamuel L. Jackthon) is unrolling a scheme that threatens...the fate of the very world. Vaughn (Layer Cake, Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) is on familiar turf when it comes to sixties style and Brit cloak and dagger - he gets Millar's humor and charges toward the R-rating with unhinged glee. Some of the riffs may have you thinking, Is this Austin Powers? But Kingman takes the idea of style to an extreme degree - it's all Savile Row, not Carnaby Street.
The opening sequences of Kingsman are spectacular and attention-getting in a major way. The setup of Harry revealing the Kingsman universe and code to Eggsy make a superb, hilarious origin story.
But I ran into two significant issues with the picture, one of which is just poor timing. I had the bad luck to watch Kingsman shortly after this June's Charleston, South Carolina Church Massacre - and there's a sequence here that's going to be a severe deal-breaker for some. If I did not have the horrors of that real life event in mind, how would I have viewed this scene? Would I have just grinned at the Paul Verhoeven excess? So I felt tainted and that skewed me. It's going to go down as an infamous sequence, that's for certain.
The other thing's hard to talk about and stay non-spoilery. Let's just say that some impressions are so indelible and world-perfect that the world doesn't always survive their departure. I had a hopeful expectation about that, which unfortunately never materialized in the third act.
Still - Kingsman is fierce satire with a capital S. Millar and Vaughn are tweaking genre conventions, English society, violence, climate change, the aristocracy and everything in between. There's some meta-winking and wall-breaking that you just have to go with. Kingsman - and its characters - are unquestionably aware of self. But the characters and story really grab you, and while I probably sound vague and unsatisfied, I'm really not. Kingsman is terrifically entertaining - and very much in your face. Any action fan, and particularly any Bond fan, will not want to miss it. I suspect I'm going to overcome any speed bumps I had on a second viewing, which I'm definitely excited for. There's also one of the best cameos in Kingsman that I've ever seen - but there's no way I'm spoiling that for you here.
The spy genre is alive and well, ladies and gentlemen. Just take care not to get too much blood on your suit.
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