For me, director Matthew Vaughn is racking up quite a track record. While not all of his films are great, they're always at least good and enjoyable. Kingsman: The Secret Service is one of his great films.
Eggsy is a lad from the wrong side of London town who finds himself invited to apply for a job with Kingsman, a private spy organization that for decades has discretely and covertly helped maintain world peace. There's only one opening, so he'll be competing with others and may the best man (or woman) win. Meanwhile, Valentine, a multi-billionaire tech titan is scheming to destroy the world because man causes global warming and global warming is bad so man must die die die. An amazing amount of violence ensues.
I was startled to find that the film had a plot straight out of a Tom Clancy novel (specifically, Rainbow Six). Environmentalists, at least the more militant of the anthropogenic catastrophic global climate change crowd, do not come off well in this film. That they are also portrayed as the dreaded 1% is just too delicious for words.
The Kingsman have adopted the mantle of being modern knights of the round table and so each has a code name from one of Arthur's fabled followers, with the leader being Arthur (Michael Caine). Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is competing for the opening made by the death of Lancelot (Jack Davenport) and he's guided in his training by Galahad (Colin Firth, having lost his speech impediment from The King's Speech but none of his suave demeanor). Their instructor is, of course, Merlin (Mark Strong); he's fantastic.
Valentine (the great and powerful Samuel L. Jackson) speaks with a lisp and has an incredible aversion to blood. You first think this is a joke, but turns out to be a statement of fact. In turn, Valentine has a remarkable sidekick in the guise of Gazelle (Sofia Boutella). Gazelle lives up to her name in speed and agility, her lower legs having been replaced by those curved springs that double-amputee runners have been known to use. Only hers are enhanced with short swords; she's awesome.
The film's action pieces are nicely staged and generally easy to follow. The camera tracks along cleanly, for the most part eschewing the evils of the shaky cam. From time to time, though, it becomes clear that computers are at work, which bleeds (ha!) a bit of the vitality out of several sequences. There are also moments of slow motion camera work which again justify my belief that the only director in the history of cinema whoever did slow motion action right was Sam Peckinpah. Slow motion actually detracts from one climatic fight.
There are a couple of things about the film that bother me. One involves a church of stereotypical churchgoers who are obvious stand-ins for the odious Westborough Baptist Church. Not content with them being raging zealots, the film paints them as irredeemable racists. And then gleefully slaughters them. Given that, in the context of the film, they are essentially innocents, the point would have been brought home much better without the racism. As it is, you almost cheer as they are killed one by one because, hey, bigots deserve to die die die, don'chaknow.
Another bother is President Obama. The filmmakers have denied it, but it's pretty clear that the US President in this film is Obama and he's a portrayed as a traitor. Presidents (and all world leaders) are often fair-game within a film, subject to ridicule and derision (e.g., "Bush" in the first Transformers film). But it annoyed me when the film The Assassination of George W. Bush came out during that president's term of office, and it's disquieting to see "Obama" slandered here. For the record, I am no fan of Obama but this just seemed wrong.
And that's pretty much it. The film moves at a near-insane clip while never feeling rushed. I appreciated that no one in the film is an actual idiot. Valentine is clever and soon begins realizing he's being hunted. A cat-and-mouse game evolves as Galahad attempts to figure out what Valentine is up to while at the same time Valentine tries to figure out who Galahad works for. This evolves into open warfare and as the world begins to go to hell in a hand basket, it's Eggsy to the rescue.
The cinematography is great. The music (from Henry Jackman, who worked with Vaughn on X-Men: First Class, and Mark Margeson) drives things along with echoes of spy films past. The editing is clean, and all of the acting is more than adequate for the task at hand. As implied above, I loved Strong's take as Merlin. A favorite moment is when he tells Eggsy to take the chip off his shoulder. Boutella is utterly convincing as Gazelle. She sells both her ability to chop people up and her loyalty to Valentine; she's wonderfully not stupid. And Mark Hamill has a cameo as a vaguely eccentric scientist; I swear he breaks into his Joker voice.
Yes, the clash of classes (Eggsy from the lower, his competition from the upper) can be tiring. Yes, there's at least one test which is ridiculous and a twist near the end that works to undermine much of the film's the entire setup, but in total, Kingsman is a thrill from start to finish.
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