Reloading - Kingsman: The Secret Service

You guessed right folks! It’s another Monday, meaning another Reloading to review a game, movie, or thing for you! Today we have Kingsmen: The Secret Service… which, again, is a movie from January… being reviewed in May. Shut up, I’m getting there. 

The plot? It’s James Bond, if he went to a Harry Potter style school that caught how to kill people with guns and blades instead of killing people with wands and posh-British Accents. Oh, wait, I guess they both take place in London, so ignore that last part. The story focuses on a young man named Eggsy whose father was part of a secret government agency like whatever Archer is now since they can’t be called “ISIS” or whatever Austin Powers belongs to as well. His father dies on a mission and a young Eggsy is given a calling card to call the “Kingsmen” whenever he needs help.

Said help is needed 17 years later when Eggsy is in a bad spot with the police after acting out against his step-father’s thugs who all treat him and his mother like crap. The one who arrives is an agent with the codename Galahad and he elects Eggsy to join the ranks of the Kingsmen in order to replace a fallen companion, Lancelot. Eggsy attends a training academy longside co-star Roxy and several other less-important characters. The training program ranges from things like surviving a flooded room to pin-point accurate sky-diving to shooting a dog. All of which tests various aspects of their character.

There’s also a villain to the plot, because there has to be. And he’s Valentine, played by Samuel L. Jackson and he nails the part perfectly. His plan is to drive everyone insane by using a new internet service that is given to the world for free and releasing a special signal through that network. It’s actually quite ingenious, if not downright insane. But the plan is eventually foiled by Eggsy and team because good-guys still have to win after all.

The spectacular moments are all stolen by Collin Firth, who plays Galahad. There’s a particular action sequence in the church where he is brutally fighting other people who have gone made due to Valentine’s plan. But it is certainly one of the better action scenes I’ve seen all year (at least at the time of writing) and this itself may earn Kingsmen a spot in my top movies of the year for just that alone. Which speaks well of everything else in the film.

That being said, just because it gets a nomination for a spot near the top doesn’t mean I expect it to make the top. It’s major problem is that the film doesn’t know what it really wants to be. For a large portion of the film, it feels like a high-quality parody of spy-films and James Bond, but then it takes a darker and more serious twist nearing the third act which just doesn’t fit well with the rest of the film. Not to the degree that the alien-hive segment of Duke Nukem Forever didn’t fit into the game tonally, but it’s still jarring enough to make the middle part of Kingsmen feel off in a way that almost sours the taste, if you will.

This is exaggerated to great effect in the third act when things go bonkers, heads literally explode, and a female prison offers up sex to the protagonist in exchange for freedom and the protagonist perks up immediately at the thought of that, almost forgetting his mission for a second. Again, this is a jarring change of tone when you are following the second act deaths, brutality, and deep message about environmentalism.

But none of this makes the film bad enough to not recommend. Again, the action scenes keep the film flowing decently, even if it felt a little long. The humor helped get through some of the slower bits. And the dark parts of the film, while again tonally awkward, were still very interesting and thought provoking. It may not all have meshed together well, but it was still a fun ride that just needed some smoothing out in terms of narrative direction.

That’s all for today’s surprisingly short review of Kingsmen: The Secret Service. Please be sure to like, share, comment, and subscribe to the blog as well as check out the YouTube channel. We’ll be back with more very soon.