February 14, 2015 -- Spy action movies have been around a long time and there are plenty of them, but there is always room for one more good one. There's the venerable James Bond series, the Jason Bourne series, the Mission Impossible series and now Kingsman, which could become a new series.
Kingsman is a super-secret, privately funded British spy service dedicated to maintaining peace and world order in a discreet, gentlemanly, stylish manner, using code names adopted from the Arthurian legends. We pick up the action years ago with a dangerous operation to get information out of a terrorist. The top Kingsman operative, Harry Hart (AKA Galahad, played by Colin Firth) and his fellow operatives are about to be blown up by a terrorist with a hidden suicide vest when one of the agents throws himself on top of the terrorist, taking the brunt of the explosion and saving the others.
Harry Hart is mortified that he did not see the danger in time and is determined to pay back the debt he owes to the man who saved his life. He visits the widow, Michelle Unwin (played by Samantha Womack) and young son of the dead agent and delivers a medal to the boy with a phone number engraved on the back and tells him the code words to say if he ever needs a favor.
Years later, the boy, Gary 'Eggsy' Unwin (played by Taron Egerton) is a juvenile delinquent with an abusive stepfather. He is arrested by the police and needs a favor. He calls the number on the medal and gets out of jail free. Outside the jail, Harry Hart is waiting. He sizes up the boy and decides he has potential. He invites him to join the Kingsman group to take the place of a recently murdered agent, Lancelot (Jack Davenport).
Eggsy undergoes rigorous training and tests conducted by Merlin (Mark Strong of “The Imitation Game”) with a group of other recruits and passes all the tests until the final one, which he fails, but for a good reason. Roxy (Sophie Cookson) becomes the new Lancelot, but Eggsy isn't done with the Kingsman organization yet. He is pulled back in to save the world from a crazy scheme by a megalomaniac billionaire, Valentine (played by Samuel L. Jackson).
This has all the usual elements of a James Bond film: Underground lairs, a megalomaniac bent on destruction, the fancy high tech gadgets, the deadly adversary (Gazelle a “blade runner” with real blades in her prosthetic feet, played by Sofia Boutella) etc. But it also makes fun of the usual plot points of the Bond films. Characters say pointedly “It isn't that kind of movie.”
What makes the story interesting are the characters, who are all fleshed out. More than is the case in most spy movies, most of the main characters in this film are like real people. They have feelings and motivations which are understandable. The fight scenes are very well staged in this film. The acting is solid in all the main characters. There is a lot of action and a lot of dead bodies before it is over. There is even a scene with about a thousand exploding heads, but it isn't too gory.
I was a little annoyed at the lisp of Samuel L. Jackson's character, Valentine. I don't think it added anything to the film. The parachute gig where the chute opens at the very last second happens, not once, but twice, in the film and that is a bit of cliché, but other than those quibbles, this is a fine and dandy spy movie with real style. It rates a B. Trivia note: Mark Hamill (“Star Wars” movies) plays a small role in this film.
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