SPOILERS FOR KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE BELOW
For decades, the spy genre has been dominated by the James Bond franchise. He has become synonymous with cinematic espionage, with only temporary challengers like Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt even coming close to approaching the type of cultural impact that 007 has brought to the big screen since the 1960’s. There are subtler and smaller spy films in the margins, your John le Carré adaptations of the world, but many of the bigger films use James Bond as a template. If you use actors like Daniel Craig or Sean Connery as your model, spies are supposed to be cool, suave, and classy. They drink their martinis, drive Aston Martins and live a lifestyle of danger and sophistication.
Kingsman: The Secret Service was produced with the specific intention to be a black sheep of the genre. Even a decade after its release, the adaptation of the Mark Millar comic series is an immense standout of the genre. It is provocative and a little bit trashy, a working class R-rated spy fantasy that gets its hands dirty in ways that Bond or Bourne movies could never do. Above all, it is extremely fun.
There’s a world where this movie was completely rejected. The film’s explosive ending alone, a literally mind-blowing extravaganza where Barack Obama’s head goes KABOOM, could’ve been easy fodder for exhausting thinkpieces. If it was released today, there’s a good chance that would’ve happened. But what Kingsman was able to do is convince its audience to lighten up and embrace the silliness. It’s both a vulgar Looney Tunes cartoon and a serious action movie with stakes.
Execution was crucial to making Kingsman work, and they found the right man for the job. Matthew Vaughn had already done the Mark Millar thing before signing on to this film. His adaptation of the superhero comic Kick-Ass is a similarly riotous subversion of a tried and true genre, with tweenage Chloë Grace Moretz chopping up bad guys and cussing up a storm as Hit Girl. Kick-Ass was a great template for Kingsman, particularly when you look at what it did to help provide a new jolt of energy to a genre that had grown into a pattern of repetition.
Ever since his big breakout debut Layer Cake, Vaughn has been known for his ability to keep the story focused and build his style around it. The standout sequence of the film, where Colin Firth’s Harry Hart mindlessly murders dozens of religious bigots in their southern church, remains one of the most kinetic and shocking action beats of the century. Hart is the film’s closest approximate to Bond himself, and yet by the time the “Free Bird” guitar solo ends, he’s shot and impaled his way through three films worth of 007’s body count.
These aren’t pretend murders, and this is meant to be a really dark and disturbing sequence, even ending with Hart’s death. However, it’s shot with so much skill that you can’t help but enjoy it. The first half of the film is fairly straightforward, with plenty of training montages and expository scenes about the history of the spy organization. This is not as exciting as the movie’s best moments, but it allows Vaughn to ease you into the madness. That church sequence comes right at the perfect point, and from there it’s absolute violent madness until the finish.
There’s a bit of fantasy fulfillment in watching Eggsy, a middle-lower class rebel with a foul mouth and a soft spot for his mum, get swept away by Harry and the Kingsmen. We learn later that it’s a family legacy sort of thing, but for a while it looks like he’s just been plucked from the doldrums of his life. Like the James Bond movies often do for its stars, this movie established Taron Egerton as one of the most promising young stars in Hollywood. He’s charismatic when he’s playing both street and his own version of the traditional spy character, showing a versatility that he’s showcased in major dramatic roles (the Elton John biopic Rocketman, Apple TV+’s Black Bird) and other action endeavors (the extremely popular NETFLIX thriller Carry-On).
Kingsman also followed the Bond model by surrounding the central spy with so many heavy hitting veteran actors. Firth is the epitome of this movie’s against-type approach. He looks and sounds the part of a stuffy spy, but gets his hands dirty more than almost anyone else in the film. Mark Strong often is typecast as a brute–you could even see him playing the heavy in a Bourne movie–but he’s gentle as the gadget expert Merlin. Samuel L. Jackson gives one of my favorite performances from him in this film, a complete maniac with a lisp, a love of designer shoes and fast food whose plan to take over the world is absolutely psychotic. Those four performances are the core of the film’s nucleus, though key supporting performances from Mark Hamill, Michael Caine and a brand-new Sofia Boutella add a lot as well.
The Secret Service still stands out in how perfectly calibrated it is as a piece of popcorn entertainment, striking a balance that is so specific that the rest of the movies in the franchise can’t even recapture it. The 2017 sequel The Golden Circle has its moments but was mostly exhausting, filled with underutilized A-list stars, ridiculous plot twists and ineffective gross-out humor. The 2021 prequel The King’s Man was even further off-base, taking the silliness back to a very NOT silly time of World War I, going as far as to tease Adolf Hitler as a big baddie in a mid-credits scene. Needless to say, Hitler is not Thanos.
Vaughn directed both of those follow-ups, so it’s not like he’s handing off the franchise to someone else. It seems clear to me that the franchise that was once such a breath of fresh air needs its own revitalization (and no, a crossover with Argylle is not the answer). Even if they never get the magic back, the 2015 kick-start to the Kingsman franchise showed us definitively that spies could be cool AND crude.
