Kingsman: The Secret Service

Your momentum in Hollywood can come to an abrupt halt at times if you simply produce just an ok movie; ask John Singleton (Four Brothers) or Guy Ritchie (Swept Away), that is if you can actually find them. The man who once gave us Brad Pitt's best and most incoherent character in Snatch, for all intents and purposes disappeared for seven years the second Madonna and the seductive gap in her teeth lured him into making one of the worst movies ever. Had he not seen Dick Tracy or Body of Evidence? And how does that gap not make him think that he's making love to Michael Strahan?

Well when I saw that the release date for Kingsman was pushed back, mainly so they could find more sideways baseball caps for Sam Jackson to wear, I was worried the same thing would happen to it's director Matthew Vaughn. This is the same guy who introduced us to Daniel Craig in Layer Cake and also brought us Kick Ass and X-Men: First Class. The previews for Kingsman looked ridiculous because it had old men fighting armies with umbrellas and had a teenager with a thick British accent trying to be a thug.

I don't know about you but hearing Brits or any European accent for that matter trying to be ghetto is the funniest thing ever to me! This is why British rappers don't make it in the US; we find a 5'4" Ja Rule to be more menacing than that gun wielding and dope rhyming drug dealer from Attack the Block was. So please Hollywood, do yourself a favor and simply stick to Bond villains and soccer hooligans and things will work out the way you hoped.

Well thankfully the push back wasn't a nail in the coffin for Kingsman as it still has the unique action shots that you've come to expect from Vaughn, the slightly sped up sequences that at times slow down to show you the really cool parts of fighting, like teeth flying or blades slicing open random body parts. And he uses the absurdity of the action to add comedy to his movies so that they never take themselves too seriously. He even mentions how spy movies have become far too serious these days and how we need to go back to the over the top movie plots the old school Bond movies had.

So you shouldn't question why Sam Jackson's assistant has blades for feet or how some villain plans to control the global population problem by using a biological weapon that forces us to kill one another. All you should care about is the fact at some point in the movie, hundreds of heads explode simultaneously and that Colin Firth basically takes out an entire hatred group using only his hands, a gun, and an ax. He may have used other means, like a broken church pew or two, but I was too busy laughing to care.

And that's basically the plot, Colin Firth is one of the head Kingman who decides one day to recruit Eggsy, the son of one of his fallen comrades, to replace an agent who was recently killed in action. Eggsy goes through a brutal training program to see if he actually has what it takes to beat out the other recruits, all of whom come from a more privileged background than his. And all the while this is happening, the agency is trying to track down who is behind the mysterious disappearances of the world's A-listers which include dignitaries, pop stars, and scientists.

There's enough action and beautiful people in the movie to keep your attention and while this isn't the best movie, I found it to be entertaining. I rate it as fairly FRESH.