Free calls. Free internet. For everyone. Forever. Samuel L. Jackson is Valentine — villainous internet billionaire in a sideways baseball cap with a distinct lisp, an aim to save the planet from global warming and a hot accomplice named Gazelle with large blades built into her Pistorius-style prosthetic legs — offers the world. Who could say no?
Meanwhile, celebrities and ministers, rapper Azealia Banks and a Nordic princess are disappearing. Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Secret Service (based on the Mark Millar's comic, The Secret Service) flaunts its zany plot that grows from a simple notion. The suit is the modern man's armour.
Eggsy, played by Taron Egerton, is picked up from a police station, where he's being held for committing petty crimes, and taken straight under the wing of the gallant Galahad, Colin Firth, of Kingsman, a secret service modelled after King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table that operates out of a bespoke suit tailor shop. Galahad sits in an office with red walls, decorated with the front pages of The Sun from days he did something remarkable that went unnoticed by the world. On one of those days, "Brad Pitt ate my sandwich".
Eggsy has, of course, never met a tailor in his life. He's never seen Trading Spaces or La Femme Nikita or Pretty Woman. He has seen My Fair Lady, though. He lives in a cramped social housing apartment with his mother and an abusive stepfather. That is, until he's thrown in with a bunch of Oxbridge-don't-you-know-who-my-father-is types, with whom he trains and competes. Eggsy himself has been recruited because of the deeds of his father. The crew lives in a bunker, each taking care of a puppy — Eggsy picks a brooding pug because he thought it would grow into a fierce bulldog.
The ingredients of the film are common and routine. The characters have been tried. There are Martinis (they're gin, not vodka). Even the gadgets are familiar: a poison pen, a lighter grenade, microchips implanted in the back of the neck. Yet Kingsman is testament that outrageous spy spoofs can be entertaining and gripping, that clichés can be done right.
This pastiche child of James Bond and Quentin Tarantino is brash and boisterous, fun and energetic. It is taut and playful, with just the right amount of self-awareness. Firth carries the film — it's s a treat to watch him get into a pub brawl in his refined suit after being interrupted from finishing his pint of Guinness, to see him stake a priest and split a woman's head open with an axe in a Catholic church in rural America. Absurdity is key. Galahad and Valentine talk about James Bond films. Valentine serves Big Macs on a plate and washes it down with aged wine. Hundreds of heads explode like fireworks to the refrain of Land Of Hope And Glory. The female characters are, of course, negligible — it is an homage to spy films, after all.
But please, it's 2015.
