Killer style
Rude bar patrons are a nuisance, a fact that posh gentleman Harry Hart (Colin Firth) addresses when his young companion Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is accosted by local yobs in a British pub. Hart crisply locks the bar doors from within, and gives new meaning to “pulling a pint,” sending a loaded beer mug hurling across the room with a flick of his cane.
Firth makes an unlikely action star, but pulls it off with typical aplomb in Kingsman: The Secret Service, based on a comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Hart is a member of the Kingsmen — not the rock band that sang Louie Louie in the ‘60s, but a branch of the British secret service started by — so the story goes — tailors who amassed a fortune after WWI and wanted to do good for Mother England.
They recruit Eggsy, an underprivileged lad heading for jail time whose father was Hart’s Kingsman colleague — until he died on a mission. Now Hart offers Eggsy a chance at a new life, but he must absorb a few life lessons first.
“Manners maketh the man,” declares Hart before dispatching the rude bar patrons, but it’s also clothes, as another saying goes. Hart’s office is located inside a Savile Row tailor’s shop, appropriately, and it looks like that’s where he buys his custom-made suits. (This is in sharp contrast to Eggsy’s garb, which looks like something graffiti artist Banksy might sport.)
But Hart meets his match in the effortless style of Valentine, an arch nemesis played by Samuel Jackson with a comical “lithsp.” Valentine is a multi-billionaire who’s up to no good, but he always looks sharp in casual golfer duds and street chic. Valentine wants to give the world “free phone calls, free Internet, forever,” but you know it’s just a ploy masking an evil plan, something Hart and his sidekick-in-training Eggsy are sent to unmask.
Hart and Valentine — dig the paired names — play a game of cat and mouse over dinner of Big Macs and fries, where Kingsman gives up its true intentions: it’s a spoof of spy films, sure, but it’s also nostalgic for the days when James Bond movies were less serious, and where the supervillain made the movie. (They must be referring to the Roger Moore years.) Valentine is a fun villain, a kind of super-nerd with a deeply evil brain, helped by a lethal companion named Roxy (Sophie Cookson) with stiletto heels to die for — literally. It will take the straitlaced Hart and his callow companion Eggsy to defeat their evil master plans.
There’s nothing particularly new about this type of spy spoof, though director Matthew Vaughn injects it all with a high degree of zest and kick-ass action. Jackson, as always, brings something larger than life to the table, and he’s a franchise all his own. Cue Jackson ditching his askew baseball cap and picking up new fashion attire: “Now this… is a dope-ass tophat.” Valentine, it turns out, is not just a maniacal genius — he’s an ecoterrorist, trying to save planet Earth by reducing its toxins. In other words, us.
Hart, too, dispenses more than spying and killing expertise: he takes Eggsy to his Savile Row shop and proffers not only weapons training, but grooming tips — how to wear Oxfords, with or without broguing, for instance. Not to mention poisoned-tipped knives in shoes, electrified signet rings and deadly fountain pens for the well-dressed man.
Despite its many action sequences, the centerpiece of the movie has to be a five-minute killathon staged in a Kentucky Baptist church where the Kingsman annihilates — with extreme prejudice and surgical skill — a nonstop congregation of bigots and racists to the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird. It’s this kind of cray-cray blood and guts explosion that has likened Kingsman to ultraviolent comic epics such as the original Kick-Ass (not the dreadful sequel). This is where the tone of the movie shifts into serious adrenaline overdrive.
Also on hand to add spying gravitas are Mark Strong and Michael Caine as avuncular older hands, steering Eggsy along the proper path to being a gentleman — and being a cold-ass killa.
There’s a somewhat buried message here about class and “snobs” and people finding their true worth. Egerton plays Eggsy with full East Side accent and gangsta attire — tracksuit and all — until he learns valuable lessons about being a gentleman. Nothing beats a stylish suit, for instance. “The suit is modern man’s armor,” declares Hart, “and the Kingsmen are the modern-day knights.” Shucking old clothes is one thing, but Kingsman says you have to escape your roots, if they’re holding you back. “True nobility is being superior to your former self,” Hart adds, quoting Hemingway. But the message is very Great Gatsby.
One could quibble that the movie mixes genres a little too liberally — the ultraviolence seems out of proportion to the more genteel bits — but after all, we live in a time when people champion The Interview as freedom of speech, even if it does depict Kim Jong-un’s head disintegrating in slow-motion. People apparently want their entertainment like they want their video games — fast and furious, and with clear sides drawn. Kingsman delivers on that promise.
