Movie Review: The Kingsman

Only six weeks into the new year, and 2014 has its first better-than-good mainstream movie. Kingsman is well-acted, excellently cast, staged with cunning action sequences, and may be the most genuine fun I’ve had at a movie in months. Don’t let me oversell it though, the film’s not perfect…

What Works: I’m only a sporadic Colin Firth fan, but there’s no denying he’s terrific in his first official “badass” role: a proto-James Bond type spy who’s actually much more elegant and mannered than Daniel Craig or the last few Bonds. It turns out that the best “reinvention” of Bond is a rewind. Newcomer Taron Egerton is also solid as his young spy protege.

Still, movies like this may live or die based on their villains, and their henchmen (or henchwomen), and “Kingsman” gets great use out of Samuel L. Jackson’s lisping tech baddie and Sofia Boutella’s appropriately named Gazelle, a fast, beautiful double-amputee with deadly razor legs. Even more rare for this type of film: you can actually understand the villain’s point of view, and the heroes don’t even attempt a solution to the environmental problems raised. Wondering about the merits of a genocidal supervillain’s plan is a bold concept for a spy film. Jackson is a villain so convinced he’s the good guy that he actually hates blood or killing anyone he doesn’t absolutely have to…except for the majority of the planet.

There are familiar spy-movie paces in this, but everything is smarter or more surprising than you might think, like the creative spy training Egerton undergoes or the pure anarchy of Firth’s extended fight in a Kentucky church. Watching the former Mr. Darcy-turned-superspy go apeshit in a violent free-for-all? That’s as close to movie nirvana as you might get in February.

What Doesn’t: There are twists and turns that really work, and then there are things that are surprising but almost take you out of the movie. [Vague spoilers] There’s a character death that is certainly shocking (although maybe not so much if you’ve seen director Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass movies) but it makes the film less satisfying. In almost any other movie, I would welcome such a break from convention, but in this one I finally understood why more films don’t kill off beloved characters. [End vague spoilers].

Also, some reviewers have called out an anal sex joke made late in the movie, but that once again shows that they’ll let just about anyone review movies for a magazine these days as the joke in question is literally one line of dialogue and I had to think hard to even remember it when I read those reviews. It says something about our culture that a throwaway line of dialogue about anal sex can be seen as poor taste, but not a montage of exploding heads and the church slaughter was usually praised in those same reviews. In 2014, it seems carnage is celebrated but carnality not so much.

What I Would Have Done Differently: Not killed a certain character, I really can’t emphasize that enough. I know I feel like a hypocrite since I’m always saying more movies should take chances like that, but maybe there’s a reason certain things are deemed unsatisfying. However, the rest of The Kingsman definitely delivers the goods.