IMDb 7.7 / 10
Official trailer
Kingsman is the film that reminded everyone spy pictures used to be fun. The rating here’s IMDb’s, since I haven’t watched it. Matthew Vaughn directed, adapting a comic by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Taron Egerton plays Eggsy, a South London kid with a record and a dead father, recruited into a private intelligence service by Colin Firth’s Harry Hart. Samuel L. Jackson plays a tech billionaire with a plan to solve climate change by killing most of the population.
It cost about $81 million and made roughly $414 million, and it launched Egerton’s career and a franchise.
I’ve only seen the clips and read the coverage, and that’s enough to tell me why people grin when this title comes up.
Colin Firth with an umbrella, taking a room apart, is the kind of casting joke I’d have been proud to think of. What gives me pause is the tone. The film seems to enjoy its violence a little more than it lets on, and I’m not sure I’d have as much fun with that as the crowd did.
The Setup
The Kingsmen are a private service founded by tailors whose clients all died in the Great War, funded by the fortunes with no heirs left to inherit them. They operate out of a Savile Row shop, use umbrellas as weapons and name themselves after Arthurian knights. Eggsy’s father died on a mission saving Harry’s life, and Harry arrives years later to offer the son a place in the selection process. The training section is a competition: a dozen candidates, a series of tests, one position.
Meanwhile Richmond Valentine is distributing free SIM cards worldwide, and the signal they carry will make anyone in range murderous.
The Training Section
The middle of the film is a selection process, and it’s the part that holds up best. A dozen candidates, a series of tests that are never quite what they appear, and an instructor who tells them one thing while measuring another.
The first test floods a dormitory and the candidates have to work out the exit. The last one asks each of them to shoot the dog they’ve been raising, and what the scene is really measuring isn’t obedience.
It’s a familiar structure, borrowed from military films, and the film uses it to do character work the plot wouldn’t otherwise allow. By the time Eggsy fails the last test, the audience knows exactly who he is. I think the dog test is the smartest idea in the picture. It asks what kind of man the kid is, and failing it is the answer.
For Writers
The selection sequence tests the candidates on one thing while claiming to test another, so every scene delivers character and plot at once. Trials reveal people faster than conversation does. When your reader needs to learn who someone is, build a test into the plot and let the response speak. Design an obstacle where two characters would respond differently. The difference is your characterization, and you won’t need a paragraph explaining it.
The Class Argument
Critics singled out the film’s real subject, English class. The Kingsmen are the aristocracy’s private army, and Eggsy is working class in a room full of people who went to the right schools. Harry’s argument, borrowed from My Fair Lady and stated on screen, is that being a gentleman has nothing to do with birth. The film half believes it and half enjoys the tailoring. That tension is what people either love or object to in it. A film about a working-class kid earning entry to an elite institution can be read as a fantasy of mobility or as an advertisement for the institution.
The class tension interests me more than it seems to interest the film. I’d have liked it to take its own My Fair Lady speech seriously for longer, because a working-class kid in a room full of old-school boys is a better story than another gadget. The tailoring seems to win that argument in the end, and I think that’s a shame.
The Church Scene
The sequence everyone talks about is a massacre in a Kentucky church, where Valentine tests his signal on a congregation and Harry kills everyone in the building. Vaughn shoots it as a near-continuous take set to Free Bird, with the camera whipping between kills.
It’s technically extraordinary and deliberately uncomfortable. The congregation is a hate group, so the film gets to have the violence both ways, and the sequence ends with a consequence the audience isn’t prepared for.
It’s also the moment the film’s tone becomes the argument about it.
Some reviewers took it as a brilliant piece of staging, others as the film enjoying a massacre for three minutes. I land closer to the second camp. The camera work is dazzling and Free Bird is a wicked choice, but making the congregation a hate group feels like the film writing itself a permission slip, and I don’t like being handed one that neatly.
For Writers
Vaughn stages a massacre as a bravura single-take sequence and then makes the audience pay for enjoying it. Technique that seduces before it implicates is one of the oldest moves in satire, and it only works if the payment comes. When you write violence you intend the reader to relish, put a cost in the scene that follows. Look at your most exhilarating scene. Ask what it costs somebody, and put that cost on the next page. A thrill with no bill attached is just violence.
Firth and Egerton
Colin Firth’s casting is the joke. A man known for Darcy and for a stammering king plays a spy who kills dozens of people in a church, and he trained extensively to do his own fight choreography in his mid-fifties.
Taron Egerton was unknown when this was cast, and the film is his introduction. Reviews consistently credit him with holding the audience’s sympathy while the film around him goes broad.
Mark Strong plays Merlin, the quartermaster, and walks off with several scenes. Sofia Boutella’s Gazelle, a henchwoman with blades for legs, is the most memorable design in the film.
Mark Strong is the one I’d follow into a sequel. A quartermaster who takes scenes away from Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson without raising his voice is my favorite kind of supporting work, and Gazelle’s blade legs are the sort of design idea I wish more action films had the nerve to try.
The Tone
This is an affectionate parody of the spy genre that also wants to be the best version of it, and the film says so out loud when Valentine and Harry discuss old Bond films over a McDonald’s dinner.
The gadgets, the tailoring, the exploding heads in the finale set to Pomp and Circumstance, and the princess joke at the end are all played for comedy, and the last one drew complaints from viewers who felt the film had spent two hours earning better.
Vaughn had already done Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, so the mode is familiar: comic-book material played fast, with more violence than the tone suggests.
For Writers
Kingsman pastiches a genre while trying to be the best film in it, and the balance holds because the affection is real. Parody built on contempt curdles; parody built on love lasts. When you write a send-up of a form you know well, make sure your version could be a straight example of it too. Write the scene that would work if the joke were removed. If nothing is left, you’re writing a sketch, not a novel, and the joke will wear out by chapter four.
Why It Scored 7.7
A 7.7 is high for an action comedy, and it reflects how much audiences enjoyed the church sequence, the training section and Firth playing against his own image.
Critics were more divided. The violence, the class politics and the final joke split reviews, and the two sequels are rated considerably lower. There’s no rating from me on this page. The consensus is that it’s the sharpest spy parody since the genre started taking itself seriously, and that it pushes its own tone further than some viewers want.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Kingsman casts Colin Firth, an actor audiences associate with restraint and good manners, and builds its most violent sequence around him. Casting against expectation creates meaning no dialogue can. When you write, give your most extreme scene to the character the reader thinks they understand.
Is Kingsman: The Secret Service worth watching?
IMDb users have it at 7.7, high for an action comedy, and the consensus is that the training section, the church sequence and Colin Firth playing against type are the reasons. It’s extremely violent under a light tone, and that split divides viewers.
There’s no rating from me on this page, since I haven’t seen it. The 7.7 looks fair to me for a film whose best parts sound terrific and whose worst parts sound smug. I’d sit down with it for Firth, Strong and the training section, and I expect the princess joke to irritate me the way it irritated plenty of viewers, because a film this proud of its manners ought to know better than to close on a cheap gag.
