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| Colin Firth's Harry "Galahad" Hart is a believable British bad-ass in the finest Bond tradition. |
Since Casino Royale, 007 has deliberately avoided the whimsy that made me fall in love with the Roger Moore era. Kingsman, however, shows there's room for a British bad-ass who lives in the real world but doesn't need to escape to the beach for weeks to brood about his own mortality1.
That man is Colin Firth's Harry Hart, a seasoned Kingsman agent code-named Galahad who brings back the bravado of late-70s Bond but abandons the troubling sexual politics. (Don't worry - he has some major violence issues to make up for them.) Almost immediately, Director Matthew Vaughn begins playing with the trope: our first look at Galahad2 is at the end of a mission he's botched, demonstrating that Hart is a super-spy but not super-human.
After an 18-year time jump, the rest of the film takes place along parallel tracks spawned by Hart's mistake. He investigates the brutal murder of an agent code-named Lancelot like the one he let down in the opening, and that agent's son, Eggsy, becomes Hart's latest recruit to Kingsmen. Like the modern Bond at MI6, Hart recognizes he can't stay a Kingsman forever.
Eggsy's story, as portrayed wonderfully by relative unknown Taron Egerton3, feels less like Bond than it does X-Men: First Class - Vaughn's previous film, which also wore its Bond influence on its sleeve4. Composer Henry Jackman returns, this time with collaborator Matthew Margeson, to give Kingsman's score a familiar feel as the recruitment plot follows a familiar path5.
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| Colin Firth is the undisputed star of Kingsman, but Taron Egerton threatens to steal the show. |
Hopefully future installments would address the one lingering Vaughn issue in Kingsman: unjustified gratuitous violence.
At its worst, Kingsman reminds me of Kick-Ass, another Vaughn film that shows a boy struggling to become a young man and something like a superhero at the same time. The first hour or so of struggle is fun; the second, in which the main character becomes a pretty terrible dick and helps slaughter scores of people, is not.
Eggsy starts and pretty much remains a charming dick, but he and Galahad get away with some majorly questionable conduct8. Kingsman makes it look exceptionally good9, but its body count is the one thing that makes me hesitate before recommending the film to anyone and everyone.
Nonetheless, if you're interested in an extra-bloody, irreverent spy adventure, you won't do better than Kingsman. Rejoice! This is the first great geek movie of 2015.
1 Sorry, Skyfall. I still love you.
2 Immediately after a delightfully inventive and funny opening credits sequence.
3 Just compare that movie's end credits to these.
4 Shout-outs to Full Metal Jacket, Men in Black and The Hunger Games for their obvious influence as well.
5 Who will probably continue to do so for basically no money over the next five years before doing any more meaningful work.
6 Honorable mention to Samuel L. Jackson as slimy, lisping Bond villain caricature and eco-terrorist Richmond Valentine and Michael Caine as Kingsman leader and (SPOILER) somewhat predictable traitor Arthur.
7 This is reportedly why he chose to do this project for Fox rather than X-Men: Days of Future Past, although it's still an adaptation of another work - like Kick-Ass, Kingsman is based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar, although Vaughn consulted on the source material here.
8 (SPOILER) The world is literally ending if Eggsy doesn't activate devices that kill hundreds if not thousands, all of whom are to some degree complicit in the villain's evil plot. Galahad is a little less guilty in that he's under mind control when he murders an entire church of deplorable conservatives, but he still has plenty of blood on his hands.
9 It also sounds great: Vaughn pairs the film's most brutal sequence with "Freebird," which I will never hear the same away again.
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