Kingsman
I finally saw Kingsman: The Secret Service, which I've meant to see ever since fandom went mad about when it first came out, and I enjoyed it while I was watching it for all the snazzy ridiculous spy stuff - weaponized umbrellas! Exploding lighters! - and Samuel L. Jackson as the bizarrely perky megalomaniac. Really all the actors were excellent.
But it left a bad taste in my mouth at the end - partly just because I really didn’t like the last bit (well, the last bit before the credits scene) where Eggsy has sex with the Swedish princess as a reward for saving the world. Like, that’s literally the only reason she’s in the movie, so that she’s conveniently placed to offer Eggsy reward sex. She’s just been in a cell for weeks, surely she’d at least want to get out of the cell first?
But also because the goofiness is married to a plot that includes tons of people dying (to the accompaniment of perky music, to boot), and they’ve almost all been set up as people whose deaths we should root for or at least not mind - redneck racist homophobes and jerkface rich people who are saving themselves at the expense of everyone else.
The way that they’re carefully portrayed as, basically, human vermin - horrible people with no redeeming qualities, so we can root for them all to murder each other in a technologically induced frenzy - so the movie can keep its light tone despite being about mass murder. It rubbed me the wrong way.
Possibly I’m just taking this all too seriously. This is a movie where a major plot point involves a bunch of people’s heads exploding like fireworks, after all.
And while we’re behind spoiler cut, I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that Colin Firth’s character actually died. (Possibly because I remember seeing so many Harry/Eggsy fics after the movie first came out - not that character death has ever stopped a ship before, mind, but none of them had “FIX-IT FIC, HARRY’S ALIVE” type summaries either.) He really doesn’t pop back up to explain that he was wearing an invisible bullet-repelling bowler hat or something?
This entry was originally posted at http://osprey-archer.dreamwidth.org/578297.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
But it left a bad taste in my mouth at the end - partly just because I really didn’t like the last bit (well, the last bit before the credits scene) where Eggsy has sex with the Swedish princess as a reward for saving the world. Like, that’s literally the only reason she’s in the movie, so that she’s conveniently placed to offer Eggsy reward sex. She’s just been in a cell for weeks, surely she’d at least want to get out of the cell first?
But also because the goofiness is married to a plot that includes tons of people dying (to the accompaniment of perky music, to boot), and they’ve almost all been set up as people whose deaths we should root for or at least not mind - redneck racist homophobes and jerkface rich people who are saving themselves at the expense of everyone else.
The way that they’re carefully portrayed as, basically, human vermin - horrible people with no redeeming qualities, so we can root for them all to murder each other in a technologically induced frenzy - so the movie can keep its light tone despite being about mass murder. It rubbed me the wrong way.
Possibly I’m just taking this all too seriously. This is a movie where a major plot point involves a bunch of people’s heads exploding like fireworks, after all.
And while we’re behind spoiler cut, I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that Colin Firth’s character actually died. (Possibly because I remember seeing so many Harry/Eggsy fics after the movie first came out - not that character death has ever stopped a ship before, mind, but none of them had “FIX-IT FIC, HARRY’S ALIVE” type summaries either.) He really doesn’t pop back up to explain that he was wearing an invisible bullet-repelling bowler hat or something?
This entry was originally posted at http://osprey-archer.dreamwidth.org/578297.html. Please comment there using OpenID.