Michael C here with a question: When did it stop mattering if the hero saves the day?
Recently, it seems as long as the protagonist gives it the old college try that’s good enough to get rounded up to a victory. If a few thousand innocents die before he gets the job done, eh, nobody’s perfect. I started noticing this trend right around the time Man of Steel had to be careful to keep the piles of dead Metropolitans out of frame while Superman kissed Lois Lane on a pile of rubble.
Now we have Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service which ups the ante by not only having the hero fail to stop the villain from causing an outbreak of mass violence, but by lingering lovingly on the mayhem, including a mother who is brainwashed into attempting to murder her own baby. With previous examples of this trend, one could chalk it up to blockbuster inflation, with each movie trying to top its predecessors until the implications of all that destruction became unavoidable. With Kingsman, however, it feels like the showing of true colors, dropping the pretense that the film is about anything more than unashamedly reveling in a mass bloodletting. Vile stuff.
I realize I risk coming off as a prude and a scold by taking to task a film which wants only to be giddy escapist entertainment. [More...]
For what it’s worth I fully believe there is damn near nothing you can’t get away with in a comedy if you get the tone right. Two of the best comedies ever made are about horrible racism (Blazing Saddles) and nuclear holocaust (Dr. Strangelove). The difference being that those films had wit, a viewpoint, and a deep understanding of humanity. Kingsman has none of those things, nothing at all to say except maybe, “Boo, snobs”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service is about an English organization of gentlemen spies, a sort of James Bond Squad. Indeed, with its roundtable of dapper English gents with their impeccable suits and gadgets right out of Q’s lab, Kingsman suggests a film assembled by collecting all the silliness the Bond films jettisoned when Daniel Craig took over, albeit crossed with the energy drink soullessness of the Fast and the Furious franchise, and jazzed up with a hyper-kinetic style haphazardly ripped off from Edgar Wright.
When a member of the Kingsman is killed each agent is tasked to field a replacement candidate. The dapper Galahad, played enjoyably by Colin Firth, recruits Eggsy (Taron Egerton) the delinquent son of an agent who died saving Galahad’s life, thus giving Eggsy a chance to straighten up and be the man he was meant to be, etc, etc... From there the story pretty much adheres to formula, as the green recruit is pressed into service against super villain mogul Richmond Valentine (a lisping Samuel L. Jackson, amusing himself mightily). The whole concept barely rises to the level of half-baked. It’s the kind of script that thinks making meta-references to the films it is lazily recycling will excuse the fact that it is lazily recycling them. It doesn’t.
Vaughn does his best to disguise the thinness of the material by cranking up the violence to goofy extremes, but Kingsman is torpedoed by a noxious, puerile attitude which cackles over every slow-motion severed artery and hacked limb like it is the apex of cleverness. Even the characters we are supposed to like are little more than wind-up violence machines with questionable values. One of the tests to become a Kingsman is to shoot an adorable puppy point-blank in the face to prove you are sufficiently cold. The film tries to weasel out of it by claiming they wouldn’t really hurt a dog, but it’s too late. Most of the film’s heroes are people who pointed a gun at a puppy’s face and pulled the trigger. Yay?
It’s more proof that Vaughn, as with Kick-Ass, is tone deaf when it comes to comedy. He is clearly aiming for that sweet spot that Matt Stone and Trey Parker hit so regularly where they get laughs both for being funny and for the outrageous extremes to which they are willing to go. But the material is so hollow there is no build, nothing to play off of. The film is left to trying to goad you with cartoonish displays of bad taste,
“What if we about blow up the head of a Barack Obama stand in? Does that get a rise out of you? No? How about if we have our hero butcher an entire church full of horrible Southern bigot caricatures set to the tune of Free Bird? Are you impressed that we went there?”
By the time the film ends with a bizarrely gratuitous anal sex joke that plays like the filmmakers remembered at the last minute that they meant to include something grossly sexist, the desperation of Kingsman's button-pushing is painfully clear.
In the end, Kingsman is saved from being outright offensive by being too slight to take seriously. I wouldn’t judge anyone who enjoys it simply as a little tasteless fun. For me it left a rancid taste in my mouth. The climax of Kingsman involves Sam Jackson puking directly into the camera. As I sat there having paid fifteen bucks to see this dreck, all I could think is, “I got what I deserved.”
Grade: D