Kingsman: The Secret Service review

               British action director Mathew Vaughn is obviously having scandalous fun with his new spy comedy “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” A bit of bait and switch, this alternative comic book adaptation takes what could have been a fairly hokey and overused premise and turns it into a hard-R love-letter to the spy movies of the '60s and '70s. Though modernized with fast edits and shocking violence, this movie makes plenty of references to early Bond flicks and the British television series “The Avengers”—not to be confused with the Marvel superhero property.

               Newcomer Taron Egerton plays our protagonist Garry ‘Eggsy’ Unwin, whose spy father was killed in duty, and in doing so had saved the life of his gentleman colleague Harry Hart (Colin Firth.) Jump twenty years later and Eggsy has become a delinquent London youth who’s constantly in and out of jail for petty theft as he tries to support his impoverished mother. Nevertheless, Hart sees the boy’s potential to be something more and convinces him to train in a lengthy series of extreme competitions to become part of secret Kingman organization.

              On the other side of the plot we follow the rise of mad tech developer named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), who wants to take over the world with a free computer chip implant that psychically links people to their cell-phones. Of course this chip has other undisclosed functions and when the leaders of the free-world sell out their countries and work towards Valentine’s apocalyptic strategy, the new recruits of the Kingsmen are the only ones who can stop him.

              All of this sounds like typical action movie stuff and with the training sequences that take place in stealthy underground bunkers, a good chunk of it plays similarly to Vaughn’s successful “X-Men: First Class.” Where the movie diverts is in its subversive tone and blackly comic satire. Throughout we see limbs lopped off and heads explode with knowing post-modern dialogue, where the characters openly acknowledge the film’s obvious genre tropes.

            Collin Firth, Mark Strong and Michael Caine as the higher ranking members of the Kingsmen bring a lot of class and stately professionalism to the wacky film and never let it drift too far into referential camp.  Valentine as a supper villain is pitched somewhere between a lisping, TED-talking, Mark Zuckerberg and a swag-drenched Kanye West. Jackson fully explores this contradiction and carefully crafts a sense of false bravado that sells the eccentricity of his performance. The younger cast however, including Egerton as the main character, is a little less memorable—not distractingly bad per-se, but bland in a way that makes the older cast seem all the more scene-grabbing.

              With frank sexual humor and a huge body count, there’s nothing here that suggests Vaughn or his writers care at all about political correctness or being particularly likeable.  It moves along quite nicely and the action set-pieces and fight choreography are impressively blocked and satisfying, but there’s a sneering misanthropy within all of it that pushes the movie right up to the line of satirical acceptability.  It’s downright mean sometimes and there are some sequences that are meant to play like romping cartoonish action but might alienate some audiences with its insensitivity or general disregard for humanism.  That said, it’s this type of atypical risk-taking that distinguishes “Kingsman: The Secret Service” from the glut of other teenage ‘your-the-best’ narratives that have recently exploded on the silver screen. Vaughn’s ability to nail my jaw to the ground while also keeping me thoroughly entertained is ultimately what makes me cautiously recommend this picture to anyone with a healthy love for unhinged dark-comedy.

Grade: B+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2015