2014 spy movie
Rating: 10/20
Plot: A group of spies has to stop Samuel L. Jackson from taking over the world. Two newly-trained recruits are thrust into the action.
Sometimes, I wish I were English so that I could get away with saying things like “geezer” and “tits up.”
This movie irritated me, mostly because it overindulges and fails to reach its potential. And it had some potential as this ultra-modern Bond update complete with gadgets and comic book villains with comic book plots. It’s not short on ideas, but writer/director Matthew Vaughn either doesn’t seem to know where the lines are or just has no problem crossing into ludicrous and gratuitous territories.
Take the violence, for example. I have no problem with violence in movies. Tarantino, as far as I’m concerned, can take out as many of the bad guys (or even the good guys) as he wants and do it in the most twisted ways imaginable. Generally, we don’t see regular folk dying though, and there are a couple scenes here–most gratuitously, a scene in a church–where a bunch of regular people are slaughtered in some of the most vicious ways imaginable. They don’t matter to me, they don’t matter to the other characters, and they don’t matter to the director. After all, they’re not real human beings, right? But there’s the old rule in movies that characters who do really bad things need to be punished by the end of the movie, and I think the reverse should be true as well. It’s unsettling when auxiliary characters are thrown onto the screen only to have their body parts ripped off, their heads bashed in, their stomachs pierced, or their bones cracked. This particular scene pushes the plot forward a tiny bit because we get to see the antagonist’s plan in action, but enough was enough. The first stylized fight sequence is pretty cool–modern and elegant with its technological enhancements and creativity. Gradually, I just kind of got tired of seeing the same things over and over. By the final big fight scene, I’d stopped caring at all and didn’t even really care what happened. It was all flash and no heart.
Kingsman sickens in other ways, too. Loud techno music accompanying every moment when a character does anything. A mention of Iggy Azalea. An ending featuring, for really no reason at all, a woman’s buttocks and suggestions of anal sex. And a McDonalds commercial. That’s right–a McDonalds commercial. There’s big music, a platter full of McDonalds products, a “happy meal” pun, and a big Samuel L. Jackson grin at the end. Jackson should know better, but by the end of the advertisement-within-a-movie, I actually expected Jackson to look into the camera and say, with a lisp, “I’m lovin’ it!” before Grimace and the Hamburglar pop into the scene to reveal that they’re Jackson’s henchmen.
This movie also carries some of the meta stuff a little too far. Jackson’s character keeps referencing action or comic book motifs and then saying stuff like, “This ain’t that kind of movie.” If it was half as clever as it thought it was, it’d be cute. Mixed in with the rest of the silliness, it just seems kind of dumb.
I wish I liked the characters more. I thought Colin Firth, enhanced by those special effects, was cool–suave badassery. Bald Merlin’s underdeveloped, but he’s not a bad character. Michael Caine plays the same guy he always plays but with a twist you can see coming from a mile away. I won’t even warn you about a spoiler there because the movie doesn’t do a good enough job of hiding it. Samuel L. Jackson has a convincing lisp, so convincing that I actually started wondering if he had that lisp in every movie and I just ignored it. The whole bad guy plot is really silly, something you’d expect from an episode of the old Batman television show, and his bodyguard/henchwoman, although she works as eye candy with legs to die for, doesn’t add all that much to the proceedings. Unfortunately, the main character (Eggsy) just isn’t very likable. He’s that cliched troubled young thuggish guy who, through the magic of movies, gets himself a second chance. I just didn’t like the guy and was a little annoyed when the movie forcefed me Eggsy as the main character.
But hey! It’s Mark Hamill:
Lookin’ good, Luke!
