Genre:
spy action
Director:
Matthew Vaughn
Rating:
*** (3.5 out of 5)
British
director Matthew Vaughn is the man behind two of 20th
Century Fox’s most successful franchises: Kick-ass and X-Men. His
latest offering, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is closer to the former
than the latter. Like Kick-ass, Kingsman is based on a Mark
Millar comic and is a self-referencing parody of its genre – in this case, British
spy films. The movie also takes itself far less seriously than the two X-Men
prequels. In fact, just when one scene is about to get too heavy or convoluted,
the camera conveniently cuts to the next. The result is a collage of slick camera
works and clever one-liners, stitched together by an implausible and
predictable plot.
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| Kingsman: the Secret Service by Matthew Vaughn |
There
is no shortage of silliness in the movie. There is the church massacre set
piece – an orgy of hacked limps and pulverized heads – that goes on for far too
long. The scene is a cross between Zombieland and M. Night Shyamalan’s bad
thriller The Happening. Then there is a drawn-out sequence that involves
human heads going off like the Fourth of July fireworks while Edward Elgar’s Pomp
and Circumstance March blasts in the background. Depending on your penchant
for gratuitous gore, you may find these follies part of the movie’s charm. Or
not.
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| Colin Firth about to kick ass |
While
our taste for farce varies, there is no debate that the cast is top-notch.
After clinching an Oscar for The King’s Speech, Colin Firth returns to
the big screen as a secret agent who is more articulate and better
dressed than Tom Cruise and Daniel Craig. Samuel J. Jackson plays a
tree-hugging tech tycoon-cum-villain hell-bent on culling the human population to
save the planet. Virtually unknown outside the U.K., 26-year-old
Taron Egerton is a gentleman-in-training from South London – a gum-smacking,
baseball cap-wearing Eliza Doolittle. The three actors, each
with their own quirks, take turns carrying the film but delighting the audience always. The
supporting cast is equally superb, comprising of the dependable though
underused Michael Caine, a charmingly deadpan Mark Strong, and Algerian
dancer Sofia Boutella who plays one hell of a femme fatale.
Kingsman is unapologetic escapist
kitsch, a market that Matthew Vaughn has successfully cornered. The movie will
keep you entertained for two hours on a Friday night and, like an amnesia dart from
the Kingsman umbrella, have you forget about it as soon as you step out of the
cinema.
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| Sophia Boutella, a dancer in real life, puts her moves to good use |
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This article also appears on SCMP.com under Jason Y. Ng's column “As I See It.”
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| As posted on SCMP.com |
