What is it that England needs most during the first murmurings of a bitter class war? That’s right, impeccably dressed toffs and coarse street urchins, fighting tooth and nail against a common enemy.
From writer Jane Goldman (The Woman In Black, Stardust) and director Matthew Vaughan (Kick-Ass, Layer Cake) comes Kingsman: The Secret Service. Never before have so many class based stereotypes been compounded into such a short space of time.
Our hero, Gary “Eggsy” Unwin (Taron Egerton) is the son of a tragically killed Kingsman agent, although he is blissfully ignorant of this when he is introduced to us. Eggsy is far too busy living a simple street urchin’s life, sitting in the pub and loathing his stepfather. Through a series of events that are almost entirely Eggsy’s fault, he is detained by the police, enraging an older band of thugs in the meantime. Fortunately for him, the dashing and rather violent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) comes to his rescue. Hart explains about Eggsy’s father, and tells him about Kingsman: An independent secret service which protects the world and looks really good whilst doing so.
Eggsy is then plucked from his simple beginnings in South London and thrown into a whirlwind of tweed, guffawing and upper-class spy gadgetry. His training for becoming a Kingsman agent feels like the majority of it could have been done in a montage, thus saving us the pain of listening to his inordinately posh colleagues chortle at their own jokes.
Throughout the course of this induction into Kingsman, Eggsy is reproached for having a chip on his shoulder by his superiors and bullied for being common by his peers. The whole scenario plays like Marxist propaganda crossed with a Jilly Cooper novel, only with less bonking (although that comes later.)
The superiors consist of members of an Arthurian round-table styled group. Hart is known as Galahad, the trainer of the new recruits is Merlin (Mark Strong) and reprising his love for monikers beginning with A, is Michael Caine as Arthur. It’s amazing that they didn’t force the Queen to have a cameo in this film so that we knew it was England we were focusing on.
The good thing that Kingsman has done is unite the classes. Even if the joining is between two stereotypes, it empowers us to laugh at ourselves no matter what class we come from in Britain. The villain, a shady billionaire philanthropist named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) is the CEO of a technology company and bears no significant affiliation other than to that of his own wealth and power. Kingsman raises a giant middle finger to politicians, austerity and the 1%, at a time when many films are trying to distract us from these dividing issues. Furthermore, it does so whilst being bloody funny.
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