Stories work at their liveliest best when they grab you by the lapels, drag you into the thick of things and never let go. Kingsman, the film adaptation of the 2012 comic book series The Secret Service, begins in earnest with a gripping entrée, centred around a hostage situation in West Asia, but slips quickly into laid-back languor, from which it recovers only briefly and in fits and starts.
The movie is intended as a spoof of the ‘gentleman spy’ film genre — a send-up of James Bond (and Jason Bourne) — but it’s difficult to warm up to it, partly on account of its excessive preoccupation with dandy suits and its over-the-top Britness. Beyond a point, it feels like a commercial — an overlong, over-expensive one at that — for a Savile Row suit range, with all accessories thrown in. There have, of course, been many films that commercially leverage product tie-ins after the filming, but Kingsman is that rare beast where the idea of a full collection of gentlemen’s suits (and accessories) was apparently conceptualised alongside the filming.
Colin Firth breaks out of stereotype to play the role of Harry Hart (alias Galahad), a secret agent who grooms the young son of his martyred fellow-agent into joining a secret league of world-savers. It is an intensely physical role, and evidently, Firth performed all the stunts himself, including a horrific church massacre scene in Kentucky in which he kills no less than 79 people, using an assortment of weapons. That happens right after he utters the immortal lines: “I'm a Catholic whore, currently enjoying congress out of wedlock with my black Jewish boyfriend who works at a military abortion clinic. Hail Satan, and have a lovely afternoon, madam.”
Yes, it’s that kind of a movie, with plenty of gratuitous violence, but without the classy edginess that Quentin Tarantino would have brought to bear.
Samuel L. Jackson plays Richmond Valentine, a bizarrely evil villain with a lisp (and a boringly predictable ambition for world domination). He’s a telecom billionaire who thinks the solution to global warming is a mass culling of humans, in which enterprise he harnesses SIM cards he gives away for free. The plan for world domination is centred around triggering a radio frequency that will cause people to tear each other apart (don’t even ask!). Valentine’s sidekick, Gazelle, is equally quirky: her ‘blade runner’ legs are a mean killing machine.
But not all the zaniness and the meta-narrative gags about spy films can retrieve Kingsman from mind-numbing tedium. The film has an embarrassment of riches in the stars department — there’s even Michael Caine skulking in there somewhere, doing I know not what — but never was so much cinematic talent harnessed with so little to show for it. In the utterly British idiom that the film is an unalloyed celebration of, the whole thing is a load of bollocks.