Review- Kingsman: The Secret Service
But, what is Kingsman: The Secret Service? Well, it's a film directed by Matthew Vaughn (The man who brought you Kick-Ass) and based off a graphic novel by Mark Millar (The man who brought you the Kick-Ass graphic novel). And it shows. This film does to the spy genre what Kick-Ass did to the superhero genre. It copies it, studies it and then becomes one of the best examples in it's genre. Kingsman is the story of Eggsy, a boy who's grown up in a tough area of London who suddenly gets recruited to join the gentlemen spy service known as Kingsman. It's basically Pretty Woman with guns. Anyway, Eggsy soon has to foil the plans of Evil Genius, Valentine (played to perfection by Samuel L Jackson) and save the world. Original and new, the plot is not. But it's just here to keep the film going along and to provide some incredible moments.
The actors in this film all do a great job as is to be expected from a group of actors such as this. The main character, Eggsy, is basically a chav. He lives on an estate, nicks stuff and gets in fights with other people. But from the start, there is something inherently likable about him. This becomes even clearer once he is entered into the Kingsman program by Colin Firth's character. Now, I don't really have an opinion on Colin Firth. I don't watch a lot of romcoms and seeing as that's his primary genre, I am not all that familiar with him. What I don't think anyone expected was for him to be such a good action hero. There are two scenes in particular where he performs some incredible stunts that many men half his age could only dream of doing. Samuel L Jackson is as excellent as ever, playing a crazed maniac with a love for spy movies and a silly little lisp. The rest of the cast are just as great. Michael Caine is Michael Caine, Mark Strong is in everything and Mark Hamill is doing a non-animated role for once.
Enough of the foreplay. The real action in this film is in the... Well, it's in the action scenes. And in this age of ultra edited, ultra confusing and kinda dull action scenes, courtesy of the Transformers franchise, it's so refreshing to see action done so well here. What Vaughn does is he restricts the fights to very few shots so that the camera follows the action. At first, I was worried because the action looked really fast paced and I didn't know if I'd be able to follow it that well. But the fast pace gives the action it's tone and that tone is fun. The action slowly becomes more confident and more ridiculous, incorporating everything from gadgets, pint glasses and fists into one beautiful nightmare. And then the church scene. Oh my god, the church scene. I refuse to ruin it for you but it's simply one of the best fight scenes I've ever seen.
So, go see Kingsman. If you take one thing away from here, it's that you've got to go see Kingsman. No film this stylish, this cool, this original deserves to be shunned. As film viewers, we have to vote with our wallets and we should be voting originality. And as an alternative to voting for originality through Jupiter Ascending, vote for originality through this. Okay, it is a series of well done cliches but it does them so well, you forget that other films have done it before, because, god damn it, this film just did it better. That's why Kingsman gets a:
Comments
Post a Comment