Movie review 'Kingsman: The Secret Service'- The poor man’s James Bond

Cast: Matthew Vaughn, Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Caine, Mark Strong, Sofia Boutella, Mark Hamill, Sophie Cookson
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Rating: 2 stars

Kingsman is an elite secret service organisation whose agents are the modern Knights of the Round Table combating contemporary threats. After a field agent, code-named Lancelot is killed in action by the evil Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), his seniors Harry Hart (Colin Firth) and Chester King (Michael Caine) contemplate his replacement. Hart personally nominates the son of a former agent, presently a street hoodlum called Eggsy (Taron Egerton). Offering the young man a second life and a new opportunity, Hart takes him under his wing and brings the cynical young man into the world of death-defying espionage. Eggsy struggles to get through spy school, while Harry is hot on the trail of Valentine to unearth his evil plan.

Kingsman is directed by Mathew Vaughn (X-Men: First Class) adapted from a comic book by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). According to Millar, the writer of the original comic, Kingsman was an attempt to create a “working-class” James Bond that is an ordinary child from a broken home in London’s East End becoming a cool, jet-set superspy. How does this occur you may ask? Does it happen through merit, through ambition, or initiative? Well, partly yes, but mostly it comes from family heirlooms (a service medal belonging to Eggsy’s father), connections and pure luck.

Indeed the organisation that Eggsy joins, Kingsman, is explicitly stated to be outside government influence. It’s described to be an NGO run by wealthy Englishmen, who lost their sons in the First World War, leaving behind a well of “uninherited wealth” that they sought to invest in a top-class privately funded spy agency. The fact that most of the English who died in the trenches of WWI were the poor and working class, with its wealthy officers being largely safe from harm, makes this hard to swallow.

The spy genre is essentially English. Long before Ian Fleming’s James Bond there was John Buchan’s The 39 Steps and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. The latter book features a boy raised in the slums of India, whose knowledge of local dialects eventually makes him a perfect spy and servant of England’s colonial office. In this you can see the essentially reactionary nature of the genre, the idea of assimilating people on the margins into the hegemony and institution of the state.

Knowledge of growing up on the margins of society is used not to facilitate better understanding but to better police the people. Kingsman abounds with scenes of Colin Firth uttering Tory phrases such as “Manners Maketh Man” while beating the tar out of bar hoodlums. Social criticisms of London’s low-income housing are brushed aside to make it more about poor kids giving excuses and blaming other people for their problems.

There’s also the thinly disguised anti-Americanism and questionable racial coding of white heroes fighting a non-white supervillain and his handicapped henchwoman (played by the Algerian Sofia Boutella). If the story and direction is bogged down by lazy inspiration the film’s lead actors manage to provide some fine moments of quality.

Colin Firth, bogged down by being typecast in stuffy period films and Oscar bait, is quite good as Harry Hart, sporting a warm humanity while also being brutally efficient in action scenes (including one rather shocking fight scene that was censored in some countries). Taron Egerton has a thankless role of the everyman hero but he plays his part well.

The real standouts are Samuel L. Jackson who steals all his scenes (one line reading “Hence, my epiphany” ought to become a catchphrase) and Michael Caine, who free of being butlers and mentors in Christopher Nolan movies, plays a harsher character than his recent fare.

Kingsman is far too long a film for a story as light and pastische-laden as it is. The film’s action sequences are sub-Matrix (barring one shocking moment in the Church which is well done) and as a whole, it suffocates in the weight of a narcissistic Anglophilia with its fetish for knighthood, Bond gadgets, Savile Row suits and the Sun newspaper which is apparently the only headlines that it takes seriously. The brief token critiques of the UK’s class divide and addressing establishment snobbery doesn’t take away from the film’s straight-face embrace of its emblems in the film’s climax.

The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society