If you enjoyed Kick-Ass, the first collaboration between director Mathew Vaughn, comic book scribe Mark Millar and adapter Jane Goldman, then you will go ballistic for the team's latest fricassee of hip violence and transgressive obscenity. If, on the other hand, you found Kick-Ass an overextended, witless retread of ancient deconstructions then . . . Well, you can see where this is going. The baffling degree of buzz gathering around Kingsman only proves that no bad idea can, if sufficient will exists, resist repeated popular exploitation.
Today’s bad idea is the glossy espionage spoof, or should we say, with a dread shudder, “caper”? Colin Firth plays Harry Hart, one member of a private espionage outfit run from a Savile Row tailor’s named Kingsman. When a key operative is murdered in the Alps, Harry and his colleagues – all in suits and horn-rimmed glasses – must seek out a replacement. Time is an issue as Samuel L Jackson’s tedious master-villain (replete with comedy speech impediment) is plotting to use smartphones to take over the world. Harry happens upon a working-class kid named Eggsy (Taron Egerton), son to a former agent, and arranges for him to become part of Kingsman’s training corps.
Vaughn’s characteristically nuance-free confection has much to do with class. The resourceful Eggsy finds himself competing successfully with chinless Harrovians in houndstooth but, for all the film’s egalitarian ambitions, it paints an enormously problematic picture of working-class life: pubs, drugs, fags ’n’ violence. Mind you, nothing about the film is subtle.
Though competently acted and lushly upholstered, this childish film is perennially let down by bold-type irony: so bludgeoning that it ceases to merit the description.
What's it all for? Fifty years ago, the Bond films rendered all pastiche redundant by parodying themselves in the opening frames of Dr No. Yet still they come. In Like Flint. Johnny English. Austin Powers. I expect you to die, Mr Kingsman.
