KINGSMAN OFF TARGET
Despite Firth spy film is pedestrian
Kingsman is what you get from a lifetime of James Bond movies. Writer/director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) and co-writer Jane Goldman were born between the release of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, making them late Generation Connery.
These poor folks came of age during the Moore-Dalton boundary: You can’t really blame them for what they’ve become. Their characters, drawn from a graphic novel by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, make endless references to 007, from mocking the way Bond villains try to get creative with executions, to trying to stake out their own martini-ordering techniques. (Stirred, not shaken.)
The film itself includes many a knowing nod to the Bond canon. Remember the poison shoe spike in From Russia With Love? Kingsman ups the ante with Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), whose prosthetic legs are lethal weapons.
And the violence is intense (I’d go so far as to call it appalling), even by Bond standards. Let’s just say that we’re lucky Sweden has a better sense of humour than North Korea, given what happens to Bjorn Floberg during the film’s climax.
One more point of comparison is the save-the-world plan knocked together by the supersecret organization at the heart of the film. Featuring a pair of weather balloons, oxygen tanks and a Reagan-era rocket launcher, it seems oddly ramshackle for an outfit that (as the trailers have shown) has so many groovy weapons they keep oodles of them on display as spares or to arm new recruits.
Which brings us to Eggsy, raised on the wrong side of London and played by newcomer Taron Egerton. His father died for Queen and country, and all little Eggsy got was a medallion with a six-digit phone number on it.
But he keeps it for many years, and finally decides to try ringing the number when the police collar him for car theft. Up pops Harry Hart (Colin Firth), who springs him from the lockup, beats up some bullies — he puts one guy in what I can only call a half-Neeson — and suggests that Eggsy join the Kingsmen, a group of well-dressed, wellarmed gentlemen who take their names from Arthurian legend. (I guess that makes Eggsy the green knight.)
The film then shifts to an extended training montage as Eggsy joins a cast of Kingsman hopefuls that look like they just graduated from Hogwarts. Spy school isn’t for the faint of heart: Wash out and you might drown; drop out and it’s from 30,000 feet. But Eggsy proves his mettle, in spite of not knowing which fork to use.
But while the new recruit is trying to graduate, a billionaire named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) is busy with plans of his own. With a mysterious lisp and an even more mysterious mission, he’s a difficult character to read. Is he even evil? He lives in a split-level home; Iron Man mansion up top, Dr. No lair below. It must have driven his decorators mad.
The film takes its time revealing its secrets, so much that we’re more than two hours in before we reach the finale and its mid-credits sting. And Kingsman could really use a 15-minute trim. The various plot twists are dynamic yet daft; kinetic but sometimes kooky; inventive but I’ve run out of alliteration. Unusual for a Bondian simulacrum, Kingsman features little in the way of womanizing, or indeed women. Eggsy finds a platonic friend in Roxy (Sophie Cookson) during training, and late in the day becomes enamoured of a Swedish princess (Hanna Alstrom) with the keyboard-character name of Tilde. Gazelle functions as little more than henchwoman and killing machine.
But we should be thankful for such oversights; shoehorning a romantic subplot into these messy proceedings would have ballooned the running time even further.
As it stands, Kingsman may satisfy those with a hankering for spy-on-spy violence, but with the looming spectre of a new 007 movie just nine months away, purists may prefer to wait.