Kingsman– The Secret Service

Sometimes things are just not as advertized. This movie is one of them. It has a few good scenes. One of the better ones can be viewed above. It also has a boat load of the F word and the S word, and some absolutely grotesque violence scenes, including one in a church in Kentucky, supposedly. We folks don’t behave like that in church, not even in the snake handling churches— honest. I understand that this movie is something of a spoof on the Bond spy movies. Fair enough. So you spoof violence by serving up even more vivid and ugly violence? This reveals a lack of imagination

The cast is quite good at the top end— Colin Firth, Michael Caine, Samuel L Jackson with a lisp no less. The training of young potential spies could have been a fun theme if carried on a bit longer, and with more development of the various young characters. The usual gadgets, like we have in the Bond films, show up, but with hardly anything really new or creative.

And then there is the plot— a crazy person named Valentine wants to cull the human population because it’s causing too much climate change, by giving out free Sim cards for free phone and internet service to everyone, all in the service of turning them into homicidal maniacs all over the world, except for the chosen few who party and laugh at the self-destruction of humankind, while drinking champagne. This sounds like something out of the Isis film catalog. There is a point were parody rather than being funny may cross a line into the pathetic and the grotesque. That happens more than once in this film, sadly, as it drags on for well over two hours. The church scene in particular is frankly very offensive, but then it’s open season on Christians now, and as I said, this could have come out of the Isis film catalog on Al Jazeera.

What a waste of a possible good cast and a few good scenes. It richly deserves its R rating for violence and language, in fact it might have deserved an NC-17 rating in some scenes. So….. don’t waste your dough on this film. Just watch the trailers on You Tube if you like, and you’ve already seen the best scenes from the film. This is nobody’s family film.