Craving Cinematic Silliness? Try 'Kingsman: The Secret Service'

At this point in the year, I feel as though I've seen just about every known atrocity currently being perpetrated on the planet.

Programming a documentary festival means I get an on-screen sneak peek at every dark deed and miscarriage of justice, plenty of skullduggery, and a great many unfolding tragedies across the globe. After a while I crave some means of escape. Maybe to Finland.

A few weeks ago, I went to Helsinki to sit on a panel with other film programmers from around the world -- Berlin, Cannes, Leipzig and beyond -- and talk about the world of film festivals. 

After the discussion, our Finnish hosts took us for a traditional sauna. When in Finland, do as the Finns do, meaning get your kit off and jump in the frozen ocean completely starkers. Sauna and ice-sea swimming makes everything else seem pretty easy to deal with. After the sauna, conversation turned to what programmers watch for sweet relief after a day of slogging in the documentary trenches.

The festival director, and our lovely host, admitted that she had a penchant for Vikings, the show where men in bear skins traipse about, beaded, braided and more often than not bare-chested. Anything with a ridiculous narrative, including half-naked men in fur, does the trick. After a long day of documentary lockdown, one yearns for a bit of dumb entertainment, like an hour in the yard. I'll watch old episodes of Gossip Girl -- the worst sitcoms imaginable -- so long as there's a plot and things wrap up nicely in 60 minutes.

It was with this keen craving for cinematic silliness that I went to see Kingsman: The Secret Service.

Matthew Vaughn’s romping ode to British spy films ought to have been just the ticket. After all, what's not to love about a film that combines Colin Firth getting shot in the face and Samuel L. Jackson with a lisp, and ends with a good ol' fashioned bout of up-your-bum? 'Buggery,' I believe they call it in ol' Blighty. The Brits do have a way with the English language, I guess because they invented it.

If you're willing to let your critical mind lapse into quasi-vegetation, Kingsman is entertaining in the most ridiculous, rainbow-hued, ultra violent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWLByMshYIU kind of way. Nothing exceeds like excess, and the film packs in reams of blood, insane plot points, and loads of nifty gadgets. In Kingsman, people's heads don't simply explode -- they erupt like mini-mushroom clouds, full of pink and purple hue and attended by the strains of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance." I kid ye not.

A hymn to haberdashery

It all begins in 1997. In a scene set to the tune of Dire Strait's "Money for Nothing," British secret agents are busily torturing an Arabic man for information. As Sting croons about MTV, bullets rain down and bombs explode. What fun, what jollity!

The leader of the redoubtable troop of British super spies is the cool and calm Harry Hart, otherwise known by his Monty Python moniker, Galahad. Hart is played by Colin Firth with puffy hair and thin lips at the ready. He may be worlds away from Jane Austen, but there is something of the prideful old Darciness here, not least in the way the man dresses.

Indeed, Kingsman is a hymn to English haberdashery, emphasis on the "dashery" part. I haven't seen so much tweed, tartan and resplendent tailoring since the last CBC special on the Royals. The overstuffed Savile Row tailor shop that the Kingsman use as their secret lair doubles as a place to get fat Windsor knots. This shit is as old school as it gets, but damn, it looks good.

When one of his men dies on a mission, Hart makes a visit to the new widow and her young son, one Eggsy Unwin, and gives them a medal with the promise that a call to the number on the back, and the whisper of the phrase "Oxford, not brogues," will send help anon.

Flash forward some 17 years, and the young Eggsy has grown into a strapping example of the English yob, living with his mum and her nasty boyfriend in council housing, and passing the time with pints in the pub and some light larceny. Backwards of baseball cap and lacking hope for the future, one day Eggsy picks a fight with the wrong tough, steals a car, and ends up in the nick. What's an Eggsy to do but call the number on the back of his father's mysterious medal of service and state the required phrase to the nice lady on the other end of the line?

From there it is a journey through the looking glass, quite literally, to another world of privilege, nice suits and bullet-stopping umbrellas. Recruited by Hart to join the ranks of Kingsman, Eggsy endures a rigorous training process that involves leaping out of planes without a parachute, training up dogs, and a near-drowning, all in a tartan jumpsuit, no less. His fellow recruits are a toffee-nosed bunch full of good genes, Oxford educations, and little regard for their fellow "bruv."

The class divide in England appears to be proceeding quite nicely. Eggsy's clothes and accent mark him as working class, and thus distinctly different from the other well-bred Kingsman candidates.

This war between two worlds is carried on further in the struggle between Galahad/Hart and the film's tittering villain: one Richmond Valentine, played by Samuel L. Jackson, camping it up like there's no tomorrow. Valentine, a self-made tech billionaire who dresses like a rap mogul and eats McDonald's Big Macs from a silver tray, is supposed to represent the nouveau riche, perhaps, but he is altogether stranger than that. Indeed, the man has a plan to save the planet from the ravages of too many humans.

The only thing that stands in the way of his nefarious plot to bring about bloody Armageddon are the Kingsman -- terminally polite, resolutely well-dressed fellows who aren't adverse themselves to shedding blood in the name of Queen and country.

Let the games begin, I guess.

Bond it is not

The fun of a spy film, of the James Bond and beyond ilk, is the thin line between mayhem and sophistication. Leaving aside the sexist malarkey and dated race politics, there is still a measure of pleasure to be gained from watching Bond walk the line between suavity and savagery. Kingsman initially seems like it's aiming for this same gossamer thread, but it soon goes arse-over-tits into a full-on extravaganza of misanthropy and bad taste. All holy hell breaks loose.

Blood and circuses still works, I guess. The people in the theatre where I saw the film appeared to have a fine old time. A man in a suit beside me was so thrilled with a couple of the film’s jokes that he stopped breathing. A few other times he bent double, head between his knees, like the action on screen had turned him into a human pretzel.

I like a spot of ultra violence and a "larf" as much as the next geezer, but there's ultimately something about the film that doesn't ring true.

It's not the hoary old notion that the teeming rabble must be governed and saved by an elite group of men and women in nice clothes, with excellent manners, who will preserve the status quo. Nor is it the laddish insistence that guns are cool, cars are cool, gadgets are cool, and women are not really in the picture unless they're game to go.

Perhaps it's the film's insistence that humans are essentially a bad lot: manic, mean-ass monkeys craving power and bananas, eager to go on the warpath, and screeching and hollering in a maddened frenzy.

Or it might be that in looking for distraction from the idea that humans are troublesome, Kingsman entrenches the idea even further, celebrates it even, in fountains of gore and cheap laughs. 

Or maybe -- spoiler alert -- it's simply the film's final scene, which ends quite literally with a joke about anal sex that is immediately followed by a dedication to the filmmaker's mother. Food for thought…

Suddenly, the Vikings are looking better and better. They may lack the fashion élan of the Kingsman, but I wouldn't kick those boys out of the sauna.

It's time to head back to the documentary lockdown. I'll see you when I get time in the yard for good behaviour.