Am I the only one in the world who is sick and tired of this usual bullshit? Is it so impossible to have one movie where they don’t write in female characters only to have nude scenes or sex scenes or stupid and annoying jokes like this? Is it possible that people always want to see the same thing over and over again? Their brain can’t accept something new once in a while? In this movie there were only four female characters of importance: the princess whose naked butt has now been recorded in the Kingsmen’s files, the villain’s assistant ready to do anything and kill anyone for him, the girl who made agent only so that nobody could say that they are sexist but that has really little space in the movie, and the mother who gets beaten up by the local gangster. My compliments really :-/
Now I must try to put that aside, remove it from my head for a moment to talk about the rest of the movie.
At first I wasn’t sure what direction it wanted to take: at moments it seemed a serious spy movie, at others it seemed more like a parody, and then the bad girl would come and cut her enemies into pieces that not even Goemon!
Let’s analyze it further:
as a comedy:
well, I never laughed honestly, I would have liked some British humour but here I didn’t see any, and some moments only had the effect of making me think this was some kind of dumb, not very good parody. I don’t know if the princess-scene was supposed to be funny but her naked butt, although a beautiful one, didn’t make me smile at all.
The scene when they all have to choose a puppy, and the kid chooses a Pug dog believing that he will grow into a bulldog might have been funny but for the fact that it was actually lame: so the kid didn’t choose that dog because he liked it or because he liked its qualities as a species, but only because he thought it would become big and scary :-/
Dark humour maybe? I don’t know if having lots and lots of heads explode in a colourful poof at the rhythm of a nice tune can be considered dark humour, I only know that I didn’t think it funny.
There was only one moment that can be consider good dark humour for me, when Valentine shoots Harry and then complains about how horrible it was, he didn’t like killing him at all, and when confronted with the fact that he just killed an entire church full of people he points out that he didn’t, they killed themselves! But of course I didn’t laugh because I was distressed that Harry had died. I knew it of course, there was no doubt about it, I was sure that Valentine or his girl would have killed him so the kid could take over, and yet I didn’t want it to happen.
as a serious spy movie:
come on, seriously? There are only like a dozen Kingsmen, (using names like Artu and Lancelot and Merlin and Galahad, but still using a regular rectangular table because despite the names there must be no doubt that they are not all equal, but one of them is the leader). They wait until one of them dies to start looking for a replacement! This alone seems rather silly, but let’s move on. Each of them has to bring a kid, then there will be various tests and one of them will get the job. No training of any kind seems to be involved!! I mean, how did this kid become so good? He was young and athletic, but that’s it, he had no fighting skills before, and yet at the end he’s as good as his mentor who had a long career behind him. When did that happen?
The girl who wants to be a spy is scared when she has to launch herself off the plane. Sure, she wins her fears every time, but doesn’t seem very normal or very right for agents like them to have such fears, an hesitation could cost highly sometimes. I didn’t like this.
The kingsmen’s leader is outwitted by the kid.. come on, seriously? How did he survive as a spy if he can fall for the oldest trick of switching the two glasses so that he’s the one who ends up drinking from the one with the poison? The kid switched the glasses when he made him look the other way. Pathetic. We were shown before that Galahad had seen the kid taking something behind his back, and yet their leader didn’t. :-/
The girl-spy doesn’t have one action scene. I was surprised that they hadn’t written in a relationship between her and the kid, but at the end I understood why :-/
The final test to choose between the kid and the girl was this: they were given a gun and told to shoot their dog (each of them had chosen a puppy, trained him and lived with him the entire time). That was disturbing, really, specially when we heard the shot and learned that she passed the test because she fired and he didn’t because he couldn’t. It doesn’t matter that later Harry says that there were only blanks in the weapons, that’s not the point at all. It’s not even that the blanks at such close range might seriously injure the dog anyway. No, the disturbing point was another: they are supposed to become professionals, fighting for the Greater Good, or simply mindless assassins? The kid didn’t know about the blanks, the test was to see if he’d kill the dog if given the order, and the idea that all the Kingsmen had done it in their time is disturbing. This is a movie, I want to think that the heroes fighting for Good are actually good, and shooting dead for no reason at all a living thing that has done nothing wrong is not “good” at all.
as an action movie:
now, here it gained some points. The action scenes were very entertaining, the bad girl who reminded of Kill Bill but using super-sharp blades as her prosthetic legs as weapons. The scenes with Colin Firth or whoever in his stead taking on multiple enemies were kinda awesome. Gruesome too, but still awesome. The scene when he defeats a whole church full of people is very entertaining, a long action scene where he has to use every trick to get out of there alive. Morally, at first I thought What is he doing? They are normal people who are being controlled by the evil mastermind, they are not criminals! But after the scene we hear that he was being controlled too, they all were like possessed and driven to kill anyone they could, so that’s explained.
Nothing to say against the action scenes, they were well done, well choreographed, very entertaining - can’t compare to the first three Bourne movies action scenes, it doesn’t even come close, totally different style - although not very “real”. Rather gruesome as I said, and yet more like comic-book violence, not disturbing like war-movies violence, if you know what I mean. It was more like watching a videogame when you know they’re not real people, maybe because like in videogames they are hit and they fall and die, in one or in many pieces, but they never seem to suffer, they just fall.
I wasn’t disturbed by the scene when the mother tries to break the wall to get to her child to kill her: she didn’t want to, she was being controlled and of course she doesn’t touch her. We are only shown a lot of people around the world fighting each other, we are not shown anyone actually dying, although there’s no saying how many people will have died in all that time. We are only shown crowded places like the beach or the street, and never places where people had actual weapons at hand or were alone with their children or anything that might have been really disturbing.
The villain:
the villain was good, a crazy man so concerned with saving the world, meaning saving Earth and Nature, that he wants to lower the population to save it. Too many people on this planet, with the result that Nature’s being destroyed, so he has the brilliant idea to distribute free sim cards to everyone who wants one: these sim cards give people unlimited free calls, free internet, but people don’t know what the catch is, nor they ask any questions, but this is believable, it’s actually very realistic behaviour. Tell people that they can have something for free and they won’t ask many questions, they’ll just queue to get it.
Through these sim cards our villain can manipulate their mind, sending the impulse to kill.
Actors:
first of all the villain: Samuel L. Jackson, and this should say it all, but let’s say it anyway: I liked him. Valentine was as mad as a hatter but in a quiet, intellectual way, and captivating and scary at the same time. I think he did all he could with what he was given.
Colin Firth plays Harry Hart aka Galahad, the hero of 2/3 of the movie, whose destiny is no real surprise, I knew his character would die from the start, and when he said “we’ll talk when I get back” it was obvious that he would never come back. Firth played it well but it’s not like it was such a difficult character, basically he played an English gentleman.
Mark Strong played Merlin, and I liked him, and was glad that his character survived.
Michael Caine played Arthur, and like Firth he basically played an English gentleman who talks serious stuff, he’s done that lots of times already.
Taron Egerton plays Eggsy, the kid protagonist of the movie. He was very plain, and honestly at the end he looked ridiculous dressed like Colin Firth.
Sophie Cookson as Roxy, the spy girl, didn’t have much to do: she had to be confident in herself at first and then scared but courageous in a couple of scene when she had to parachute herself. She did ok.
ITA Kingsman secret service
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