What aunt_zelda Thinks: Kingsman - The Secret Service
I was warned.
My god does this movie have problems.
Confusingly, several chunks of this movie are quite good.
The fight scenes are especially good. They’re filmed in a new way I have not seen before. I hope to see more fight scenes filmed like that. It was almost like a go-pro but without inducing vertigo in me.
Eggsy was great. Petition to have him in more spy movies. What a cutie.
Colin Firth was great. I wish they’d like, been able to get him for a full movie? I kept wishing he was captured instead and held hostage in the lair for the climax, that would have been nice.
Everything with Merlin was great. Too often the tech support person is comic relief or barely there, or just there to hand over the gadgets. Here he was a respected member of the team who ended up having to take over and lead when all of the sudden there was a power vacuum.
The female bodyguard was not relegated to a “chick fight” bullshit titillation fest, she remained fully clothed the entire movie and had a great final fight where she was a huge threat to our male hero and taken down only after a long knockdown dragout fight.
Um.
Um.
No dogs were killed.
I’ve run out of nice things to say.
As for the problems, far more eloquent people than myself have analyzed it already. I won’t go on and on about that. I’ll just summarize:
The villains are two disabled people of color, somehow championing the biggest act of classist violence ever. And yet the heroes are three white people, also part of a classist elitist organization. There is a woman during the finale whose sole purpose is to be Eggsy’s sex reward, all she wants is to bang this stranger she met five seconds ago, not leave the dungeon she’s been confined to for weeks and weeks. Eggsy tries to save his mother and half-sister from an abusive relationship and is prevented so Harry can have a chat with Eggsy about squandering opportunities. Roxy’s defining characteristic is a fear of heights that Eggsy has to coach her though. Eggsy is allowed into this elitist club because his father was once allowed in, perpetuating the very snobbery he and Harry were trying to combat. Valentine as a villain is literally a “lisping sissy” who can’t stand the sight of blood, I kid you not.
Structurally, this movie is written in very odd ways. I don’t have the energy to go into that but ... the overall structure of the film is frankly very messy.
The fight in the Church and the climactic Rage Virus fighting, while very nice to look at from a filmmaking standpoint, are pretty morally repugnant. I don’t think I’ve ever said that about violence in the media, usually I’m all for it. (See ... most of my favorite movies.)
But the story reasoning and emotional manipulation, or lack thereof, was frankly pretty awful here. The movie goes out of its way to make the church cartoonishly WBC, to justify them all being graphically murdered. Then we see the whole entire world rioting, murdering each other. We see a mother trying to murder her baby with a knife, knowing that all over the world are parents who weren’t pre-warned like Eggsy’s mom was.
I have seen this movie described as “fun” by major reviewers.
I’m all for over the top violence, but something about these scenes really unsettled me, and not in a good “makes you think” kind of a way, not in a “look at how War is Hell” kind of a way not in a “oh this is hilarious and ridiculous” kind of a way. In a purely exploitative, non-ironic, way.
My gods, this must be how moral crusaders feel about EVERY movie.
I’m gonna go read all the smut of this movie I can find. Because I kept muttering “and then they had sex” after a lot of Harry/Eggsy scenes.
Wow.