It’s frankly incongruous for this film that wants to be James Bond in Chucky One Stars, when the pimple free and perfectly coiffed cast unleash constant profanity. Even more so when the beautiful girl with perfect hair – and razor sharp ice skates for legs – first bisects a man before severing a multitude of limbs from their former torsos.
Saddest and strangest of all is Samuel L Jackson, once the coolest man alive, who ends up the least cool character in the film, all because he spends so much time and effort being so damn cool. Doesn’t matter how cool you are, dressing like an eighties rapper is a little much. And when profanity sounds forced coming from Sam MF Jackson, something ain’t right…
But for all its toughness, when someone says “shoot the cute puppy”, you just know they won’t go there.
Essentially this is a Kick-Ass style irreverent reinvention of a genre, this time obviously the Bond style spy game instead of the more ripe superhero realm. Again a young newcomer is plunged beyond their depth into an especially adult world. The results are mixed, watching Colin Firth lay waste to a church full of suddenly violent parishioners is a guilty – albeit cgi infused – pleasure, keeping pace with the teen friendly filler is more difficult.
The spy standards are there; the listening devices, the weapons shaped like… not weapons, the shooting in slow motion and the colourful henchmen. But there isn’t much new under the sun for anyone who has seen Kick-Ass. Instead of the shock value of a blue haired pre-teen Hit-Girl dropping the C word we get a tall blonde offering an especially salacious option in order to save her life. Instead of adult Mark Strong killing random people in bloody fashion we have Colin Firth doing same, while Mark Strong watches on incidentally.
It’s ironic that a long running subplot in Kingsman has the uneducated lad from the streets railing against the privileged pretty boys and their sense of entitlement, as this is the cinematic equivalent. For mine Kingsman is the pretty boy with all the money who plays it fake tough, swearing and sneering – but only when just out of the range of the adults.
Like Craig David arrived in the 90s bringing over produced pop and proclaiming himself Slicker than your Average, director Matthew Vaughan has made a career of buffing out the grit and grime in violent action, with the results being instantly crowd pleasing, but with something important still missing.
Teenagers might love the violence and the profanity, but I wonder how they’ll view these same films with the benefit of ten years of wisdom. Ten years that they hopefully spent tracking down all the films that inspired these ones.
Final Rating – 7 / 10. I feel torn endorsing something this slick and vacant, but just know that this is as good as this calculated courting controversy gets.