Kingsman: The Secret Service

Outraged Lyndon Johnson apologists upset over their man's treatment in the otherwise immaculate Selma might have to give way, because the (admittedly dwindling) supporters of our current president will likely have a significantly bigger beef with this film. Yes, Selma does seem to imply LBJ gave the green light to Hoover to enact his FBI-doomsday plan on Martin Luther King Jr. But in Kingsman: The Secret Service, Matthew Vaughn's wildly reaching action/comedy/gore-fest, it has an Obama stand-in (whom we see only from behind) readily agree to a billionaire megalomaniac's plan to wipe out 80 percent of the world's population as a way to ease global warming and continue the propagation of the human race. If that weren't enough, later on, it has the president's head explode in a plume of colorful smoke when things go awry.

This is far from the only example of this peculiar-toned British secret agent flick's wild flailing. In the course of things, we have an agent cut in half lengthwise by a female assassin's prosthetic blade feet; a mother tearing at a bathroom door with a giant chef's knife in order to try to hack apart her young baby; dogs threatened with giant guns; and a bloody, rampaging melee in a small Southern church, leaving the congregants dead and mangled by an irate Colin Firth, to the soundtrack of the endless guitar solo of "Freebird," with only the latter example truly inspired.

Part of the problem stems from the film's source material. Would it surprise you to learn that the film is, in fact, derived (loosely) from a graphic novel? Written by comics wunderkind Mark Millar -- the same fertile mind behind Kick-Ass and most of the significant elements of The Avengers movie --and that, as written, it's pretty hard to encapsulate on digital celluloid?

We meet young South London punk Eggsy (Taron Egerton) shortly before he goes on a minor tear, stealing the car of one of the young toughs protecting his horrific stepfather, a minor crime figure in his part of the city. In order to bail himself out of the resultant jam, he pulls out a special medallion given to him as a child by Galahad (Firth), a secret agent from a private, extremely well-funded organization whose mandate calls for agents to use code names from the Round Table, wear bullet-proof bespoke suits, and do good all over the world.

This eventually leads Eggsy, with Galahad's blessing, to try out for the open position bequeathed by the bisected agent, a difficult training and weeding-out process that makes the Navy SEAL equivalent seem soft and cuddly by comparison. As the training is taking place, the aforementioned bizarre billionaire, Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson, dreadfully miscast and sporting a bizarre Mike Tyson-style lisp), is hatching his insane plan to rid the earth of the virus of humanity in order for it to thrive again. His methodology -- which involves the one thing humanity as a collective is helpless to refuse: free WiFi -- is suitably bug-nuts enough to eventually bring in the Kingsman on his trail, even as they are busy determining their newest member.

So what we have is a rather clumsy mash-up of ideas and mood swings, with a few tenets of the British class system thrown in for color. Vaughn wants to film something equal parts violent, comic, and moving, a Tarantino-esque concoction that surprises you with its audacity, but with virtually none of Quentin Tarantino's control over tone, and a mad over-reliance on CGI-cheating, corner-cutting nonsensical story points, and actors trying their damnedest to be charming. Much of the film feels like a manipulative sneak.

There's still something to appreciate in the film's more inspired bits -- the "Freebird" section aside, there are a few other good set pieces (one involving the worldwide melee that gets underway after Valentine's plan launches), all of which culminate in the aforementioned colorful mushroom cloud. I suppose Obama will have no choice but to take this latest disrespectful affront with his usual good cheer. It's clearly not something the filmmakers mean for us to take terribly seriously, after all, but aligning the Prez with such a madman (and just to point out, a fellow successful black man) doesn't make an enormous amount of sense, politically or otherwise.

And we can't let this go without at least a cursory examination of Jackson's Valentine character, who dresses like Russell Simmons draped in Sean John, speaks like Tyson, wields the unfathomable wealth of Bill Gates, and does almost everything else at the whims of Jackson himself. For this, we can't use the source text -- in the novel, the character is white, a nebbish and more or less introverted -- though the character seems so broad and crudely rendered here (He eats McDonald's! The sight of blood makes him nauseated!), it feels like a satire of a specific person. Or perhaps it's just intended as an indictment of monolithic Internet corporations who have ultimate power over us with their damnably indispensable technologies.

In either case, it's a lazy rendering -- it feels as if the filmmakers dress Jackson in a monotone Yankees hat and let him improvise everything else (much in the way Skyfall seemingly allowed Javier Bardem to do whatever he felt like in a given scene). Ironically, the film -- which trades in a kind of wink-wink self-awareness of the spy movie genre -- addresses this issue head-on. In one scene, Galahad confronts Valentine and the two discourse on their shared interest of the spy-film genre: "I always thought the villain made the movie," Valentine opines.

I couldn't agree more, and that's why, among other things, as hard as it tries to engage with us, the film never quite works. Staunch Obamites can go ahead and be offended; everyone else will just have to look elsewhere for their entertainment.

MovieStyle on 02/13/2015