Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

I’m really quite surprised that the marketing for Kingsman: The Secret Service didn’t make more of the fact that its central antagonist is named Richmond Valentine, a tycoon with a sinister plot set to culminate on the self-styled “Valentine’s Day.”  It is, I suspect, infinitely more preferable than the other film opening this weekend, 50 Shades of Grey; though vastly more violent and surprisingly more chaste, Kingsman ends up being at once a highly palatable deconstruction and a heroically rousing genuine article.

Repaying the debt he owes the boy’s father, secret agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) springs local hoodlum Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton) from lockup and recruits him to be a member of Kingsman, an elite espionage unit in the heart of Britain.  While Eggsy trains to earn a seat at the table, Hart (codename: Galahad) tracks the malicious misdeeds of Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), a blue-chip billionaire with dastardly designs on the planet’s future.

As with Kick-Ass, the previous collaboration between director Matthew Vaughn and comics writer Mark Millar, Kingsman: The Secret Service bears a curious relationship with the eponymous comic book by Millar and Dave Gibbons.  The film is very loosely based on the comic, in  the way that I think all of Millar’s work ought to be; Vaughn has taken the broadest strokes from the source material and done his own riff unfettered by fidelity.  Millar’s work always has a darkly cynical edge to it, refusing to pander to the reader’s expectations and instead shocking him with truly grotesque violence and profanity.  As before, Vaughn’s adaptation is more earnest, more interested in deconstructing and rebuilding a film genre than in disparaging convention.

A point-by-point comparison would be somewhat facile (EW’s done a “top five” if you’re interested – beware spoilers in the comments), but case in point – the book unfolds the mystery of who’s been abducting science-fiction icons.  Sidebar for a fun fact: the book opens with the abduction of Mark Hamill; the film opens with the kidnapping of a climate change scientist played by Hamill.  The film, however, tells us fairly early on that Valentine is the villain, and where the book derided Valentine for being a simpering nerd, Sam Jackson’s antagonist is steeped in deliberate camp because he’s a self-conscious throwback to the James Bond villains of old.

As someone who spent the last two years tearing through the James Bond film franchise, seeing Kingsman’s loving critique of the gentleman spy brought a warmth to my heart, one that overrode my occasional frustration with the film’s more excessive laddish humor (cranked up more than in any of Vaughn’s other work, alas).  The film gives us a very suave Bond-esque figure, promptly dispenses with him, and then gives us something even better in the form of Harry Hart, the role that Colin Firth seems to have been waiting to play.  His entire performance exudes a sense of, “Look, I’ve won the Oscar for playing royalty, thanks very much.  But what I’d really like to do is be James Bond.”  He came close with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (with his costar Mark Strong turning up here as Merlin, the Kingsman agency’s tech guru).  But Kingsman is Firth’s moment to shine, and boy, is he dapper as ever.  Jackson brings plenty of charisma as the villain, though honestly he’s just playing himself with a lisp (“Do I look like I give a ----?” could be either Valentine’s quip or Jackson’s response to a dull interview); Firth, on the other hand, is all class, the kind of man that every male moviegoer ought to want to be.

Throughout it all, though, Vaughn never fails to keep it fun, never sacrificing entertainment value for self-consciousness.  In part, this is because the characters are themselves reveling in the act of nostalgia, fondly recalling the quirks and clichés of James Bond and his similarly initialed comrades (Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, et al).  But the greater strength is that Vaughn doesn’t lean too heavily on genre, instead giving us resplendently engaging action sequences for which the allusions to monologuing villains and underground lairs are mere (but in the latter case, literal) set decoration.

As I’ve said before, the film does overstep itself every once in a while; there are a few references to real-life figures, the Westboro Baptist Church and Barack Obama among them (though Vaughn is nonsensically backpedaling on the latter), where the satirical eye becomes downright mean.  The “Pomp and Circumstance” sequence, however – which some reviewers have, tsk tsk, spoiled in their write-ups – is perhaps the most lewdly absurd of these tonal digressions, and in these moments it seems Vaughn allows the reins to slip.  Millar’s pointed disdain works amid the overall attitude of his work, but in the film adaptations, Vaughn is at his best when he’s working in a sandbox populated by wry witticisms and gentle self-reflexivity.

At two points in the film, one character cites a spy genre chestnut, only to be met with the response, “This isn’t that kind of movie.”  Honestly, I’m very much okay with that.  This is the kind of film I felt was promised at the end of Skyfall.  The moment when Bond enters the new M’s office – only it’s the same office from Dr. No – felt like an emphatic “And we’re back, only better.”  Kingsman is that next step, celebrating the best of the genre while moving in a decidedly modern direction.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much excited for Spectre (the next Bond film), but a Kingsman 2 would get my ticket dollar just the same.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, language and some sexual content.”  The violence is comprised of several very bloody fight sequences, some providing very unflinching detail with some creative methods of killing; gunshots, knives, slicing metallic limbs, and hand-to-hand combat is all included.  The F-word abounds, in excess of 100 times, and one reference to an unusual sexual act is delivered for comedic effect.