Kingsman: The Secret Service is a great parody film not just because of all of the fun things it does do, but also because it avoids falling into the usual traps other spoofs have. This isn’t your Seltzer or Friedberg garden variety reference fest or just anarchy for the sake of it, instead it’s a loose adaption of a Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons comic that combines clever subversions of its genre with off-the-wall action sequences and dry wit, along with some interesting commentary on classism and social stereotypes that don’t fall along any particular side.
Its violence is on the level of an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, and considering that Matthew Vaughn directed it that probably shouldn’t come as a shock. However him and co-writer Jane Goldman bring out an intelligent script with some good twists that keep everything within a funny, tongue-in-cheek atmosphere.
The title organization is a band of dapper dressed secret agents who use a tailor shop as their headquarters. An agent early in the film dies in the line of duty trying to rescue a kidnapped professor (Mark Hamill) from evil eccentric billionaire Richmond Valentine, played by Samuel L. Jackson as a charismatic self-professed environmentalist who believes in population control. Valentine can’t stand seeing the sight of any blood or gore, despite having the apparent need to hire an assassin nicknamed Gazelle (Sofia Butella), who literally has metal swords for legs, as a personal assistant.
Top Kingsman agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth, looking pimp as hell and a quintessential gentlemen) convinces team leader Arthur (Michael Caine, in a role ideal for him) to let him replace his fallen comrade with a young but emotionally troubled ex-marine trainee named Gary “Eggsy Unwin (Taron Edgerton), the son of another fallen comrade of Harry’s. After Eggsy gets caught joyriding with a bully’s car, Harry bails him out, defeats his tormenters in a battle that would make Quentin Tarantino stand and applaud, and sends him to training with other young Kingsman grunts.
Eggsy’s overseen by senior agent Merlin, played by Mark Strong who isn’t evil for once, and befriends a girl named Roxy (Sophie Cookson) who has a higher tolerance for killing than he does. Together they try to foil Valentine’s scheme and find out who they can and can’t trust, on top of eventually questioning some of Kingsman’s harsher methods.
There are a few scenes where the characters slightly crack the fourth wall, but in such a way where it seems believable within the Kingsman universe and doesn’t take the audience out of the picture. The film spaces out its jokes and tells the story in a fairly straight manner, and because of that it’s easy to invest in the cast without a sense of mood whiplash. It knows both when to be silly and when to get down to business.
Edgerton’s Eggsy is an appealing and empathetic lead who’s probably earned himself a bigger following in America, and he has great chemistry with Firth. The latter serves as sort of a father figure (in the Ben Kenobi mold?) to him, and it’s basically the emotional center of the film. Jackson is his usual irrepressible self, very funny and having the time of his life as a megalomaniac lost in his own head, but still clearly smarter than your usual movie villain.
Despite a raunchy lean and being a gory live-action cartoon in the same way Vaughn’s other Millar adaption Kick-Ass was, Kingsman is thankfully more focused on being smart, subversive and funny than it is at being shocking. Harry and a few other characters go as far as to take some verbal potshots directly at the James Bond and Jason Bourne franchises, but this could potentially be the start of a successful and entertaining franchise in its own right.