Kingsman: The Secret Service review

It's a bloodier Bond and a classier Austin Powers. Sounds fun, doesn't it? Well, you'd be surprised. 

Eggsy (Taron Eggerton) is a working-class street thug (at least, that's what other reviews are calling him) whose father was a Kingsman, which until recently he believed to be a company of tailors. However, as Harry Hart (Colin Firth) reveals to him, it's actually a secret spy organization, and when an agent mysteriously dies, Eggsy finds himself being tested as a replacement. That only scratches the surface of Kingsman's over-the-top, convoluted plot, but good luck trying to care about it when your protagonists such so much. Throughout the movie, Eggsy ranges from bland to outright unlikable, whereas Harry never goes beyond blandly classy. For a spy movie, having the leads fail to be engaging in any way is anathema, and effectively kills the movie before it even starts. Something in the vein of Bond, which Kingsman definitely is, thrives on two things: its spy, and its villain. Thankfully, Samuel L. Jackson's Valentine is easily the film's best character, an the over-the-top, lisping environmentalist wacko who Jackson is clearly having fun playing. Whenever he's on screen, the film almost lives up to its promise.

Unfortunately, whatever strides are made by Jackson's performance are undone by the jokes, which fall flat more often than not. Whenever Kingsman isn't making dull references to spy movies, it's making puerile jokes that elicit more of a groan than a laugh. There's a few funny moments, particularly near the end, but more often the jokes possess the damning dual whammy of being not only dumb, but also dull. There's a few scenes where the humour might have worked if executed a little differently, but time and time again it just doesn't work out. In the aforementioned scenes with Valentine, the jokes rapidly switch between mildly amusing and downright obnoxious, which is sort of a description of the entire movie, really. 

Meanwhile, as a spy movie, this is trite, predictable fare. There's few surprises here, and no amount of winking self-awareness can make the cliches less tedious. Somewhere deep down, Kingsman wants to be a send-up of the old Bond films, but it lacks the brain to pull it off. The plot has all the theatricality of the old spy movies, but none of what makes those movies enjoyable, which makes it kinda numbing after a while. 

Action scenes are entertainingly brutal, but a lot of the impact is taken away by the cinematography. When the film sits still for long enough that the hits actually register, or in the one case when the carnage reaches a high enough fever pitch to qualify as a bloodbath, there's some fun to be found, but in other scenes, there's just no satisfaction to be found because it all goes by so fast and is so hard to follow. Often the brutality is sped up just to fit all of it in, but then the gore goes away too fast, removing any satisfaction that could have been had. If there's one point of the movie that really disappointed me more than anything, it's this. 

Perhaps the most underwhelming part of Kingsman, however, is how it straight-up refuses to accept its own stupidity; how it won't just ditch any pretence of class whatsoever. When you break it down, Kingsman is a trashy film, one completely lacking in sophistication and one that revels in tastelessness and carnage. There's some scenes where it seems that this comes to a head, most prominently a free-for-all fight-to-the-death in a racist church in Kentucky, but even that scene ended on a serious note, expecting us to go back to caring about the dull characters and the dumb story. 

At the very end, the film finally abandons that pretence, and it makes for a greatly satisfying big dumb climax. But at that point, it's too little, too late. What should've been a fun ride turned out to be a waste. 

4/10