They say the clothes make the man, and these are some killer duds.
Colin Firth is both ludicrously British and modern-day Hollywood in Kingsman: The Secret Service, the wildly enjoyable new film from Matthew Vaughn. His Harry Hart muses on the importance of a bespoke suit one moment and dispatches a band of villains with precise alacrity and nifty gadgets the next. This movie stands in reverence of the English upper classes and the seeming ease with which they gracefully solve problems, yet is so wonderfully absurd that, if one were ever to speak so coarsely, one would say they were “taking the piss”. Kingsman quite neatly has its scone and eats it, too.
Harry Hart is the Obi-Wan Kenobi to Eggsy (Taron Egerton), a good-natured but wayward kid living in a brutalist apartment block with his mom and abusive stepdad. But his biological father, who died years ago, had a secret identity. He was a Kingsman, and now that Eggsy has come of age (and run afoul of the law), that mysterious group has recruited him for training, too.
Kingsman is a highly advanced, well-funded independent secret service unaligned with any government. If the bit of exposition in the film is to be believed, it was founded by high-end tailors looking to maintain world security so as to ensure a market for their sharp and fancy wares. It’s preposterous, but you buy it since the info drops during a tour of the very elegant, somewhat steampunky private underground system that can whisk agents from London to their manor outside of town.
It’s there where Eggsy will train, Ender’s Game-style, and compete for the one open slot on the roster. There’s need of a new member because an operation to rescue a tweedy professor (played to great effect by Mark Hamill) has gone awry. A gorgeous female henchman with razor-blade prosthetics for legs sliced an agent in half in a lusciously decorated mountaintop chalet, you see.
This weird death is part of a nefarious scheme by Kingsman’s great nemesis, Valentine, a Mark Zuckerberg-meets-Dr Evil type and source of some of the film’s most unexpected gags. Samuel L Jackson’s psychotic baddie has a thick lisp, penchant for wearing baseball caps indoors and adorns his home with portraits of panda bears that look like they’re designed by Patrick Nagel. When Hart and Valentine finally meet tête-à-tête at his headquarters, they dine on Big Macs served on place settings. And they discuss the absurdity of James Bond movies.
The spirit of 007 is all over this movie, but Vaughn’s script (written with frequent collaborator Jane Goldman) has a licence to poke fun. There are direct references, like how to mix a martini and Lotte Lenya’s spiked shoe, but the overall vibe is sheer glee, as if no one involved in the production can believe they’re getting away with making such a batshit Bond.
Vaughn and Goldman are working off a comic book by Mark Millar, who also provided source material for their similar (but hardly as clever) Kick-Ass. Millar, whose Marvel Ultimates comics, some argue, form the spine of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe, continues to find virtue in very basic, adolescent “could you just imagine if?” narrative exploration. (L’essence du Millar can be read in his 2003 comic Superman: Red Son, in which the interplanetary basket holding Krypton’s last hope landed not in Kansas but in the USSR.) This manifests itself in Kingsman with some set-pieces designed to rattle the cages of rightwing media critics, as if on a dare. A particularly shocking bit of business happens at a rural American church, followed by some screenplay twists that wouldn’t happen in any pusillanimous or “normal” movie. Millar’s voice seems to be egging on Vaughn, whose last film, X-Men: First Class, was quite enjoyable but not nearly hardcore enough for denizens of the darker comic-book playgrounds.
Despite the presence of grandfatherly Michael Caine, Kingsman’s tone is about as far from the Christopher Nolan-style superhero film as you can get. Verisimilitude is frequently traded in for a rich laugh. The action scenes delight with shock humour. It’s violent, but not gory, ready-made for word balloons reading “OOOF” or “KRAKOOM”. This movie is so alive that few will roll their eyes at the message – one that says a true gentleman’s virtue comes from within, and not their accent. (Once Eggsy dons the proper garb, it isn’t like he loses the “bruvs”.) Valentine’s convoluted plan to conquer the world involves hacking our ubiquitous cellphones. But if the spirit of Kingsman takes hold of our culture, all we’ll be carrying is a pocketwatch.
