3 stars (out of 5)
Co-writer/producer/director Matthew Vaughn’s second filming of a Mark Millar graphic novel (after Kick-Ass), this wildly elaborate attempt at lampooning James Bond and British spy movies has strong playing, intense action and a sense of ultra-violent humour that proves surprisingly extreme and unsettling.
Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is a Kingsman, a gentlemanly spy who’s called upon when London lad and aspiring criminal ‘Eggsy’ (Taron Egerton) uses a secret get-out-of-jail-free code to, well, get out of jail. We know that Hart fought alongside Eggsy’s late Dad in Iraq and promised to help his kid if he ever needed it, and when Harry meets the lad, he’s impressed and decides that Eggsy should join an elite group studying to be potential Kingsmen. Their improbably dangerous lessons are then intercut with the rise of a lisping billionaire tech expert named Valentine (Samuel L Jackson rather overacting), whom Hart doesn’t realise is the Bond-worthy villain of the piece and at one points meets for dinner and a chat about their favourite spy movies (a sequence that gets ludicrously nudge-nudge-wink-wink). Naturally Valentine, with help from sidekick Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), a crazy lady with shiny metal prosthetic legs, is setting into play a maniacally satiric/apocalyptic scheme, and eventually Hart and Eggsy must face him in a preposterously expensive and extended final act that culminates with a gag that will probably be chopped out in more sexually repressed countries.
With hairy Mark Hamill as an eccentric professor, a plum role for Michael Caine (cast as he’s the star of The Ipcress File, one of the movies being celebrated here) and splendid work from Firth, who trained hard and did many of his own stunts, Vaughn’s bloodthirsty brainchild still winds up an uncomfortable, exhausting and even somewhat objectionable experience. Orright?
I Wake Up Screening 