Kingsman: The Secret Service Nutshell

Matthew Vaughn does it again it another ensemble piece. Kingsman: The Secret Service is a great spy movie. Going in I expected a semi-serious spy movie with all the usual tropes. The bad guy bent on recreating the world in his vision and the good guys trying to uphold what they deem good. This movie plays on every spy story possible and it is glorious; whether it’s in good or bad taste I’ll leave that up to you when you see it. And everyone needs to see this by any means necessary. As for the basis of the story, Colin Firth plays a top agent in this British spy organization. These spies basically classify themselves as the new age knights of the roundtable. They have recently lost an agent while he was on a solo mission, and they needed to recruit new members to replace him. Insert Taren Egerton as the prodigal son who is supposed to fill and surpass his father’s shoes. He is part of a group that hail from Cambridge and other prestigious British universities to fight for this spot. As a whole, the cast achieves what is set before them. Each actor fills the necessary roles and provides their own little twists with it. Michael Cain plays the elderman of this organization and provides his usual bravado when he is talking to the potential spies. Mark Strong plays the mentor of the potentials as they try to interview for the available position. Then Samuel L. Jackson plays the villain in this who is trying to establish his ideal world. I would like to go further into each characters’ nuances, but I feel like that would be something best experienced as you watch this film. The tests, gadgets, and even puppies that the potential spies deal with are an interesting take on what it takes to become part of a secret organization. The story develops at an ideal pace that makes all the other elements of the movie that much better. Then the twists! The twists are what really made it. The way some characters developed and were revealed had a different feeling for me. I wanna say that this was a pretty good if not perfect movie, but I’m scared I may be placing this too far up on the totem pole. All the elements they tried to establish worked; the slow-motion action, acknowledging past spy movies within it, etc. It just absorbed every previous spy film and tweaked it to its own needs. Besides the little social justice fighter in me, there was very little I found wrong with this movie. Sure it was tiring to see the black man and the middle-eastern man as the villain, but it didn’t detract from the main point of this movie. The main point I found being that it is a well done blend between action and comedy that it reaches higher than if it focused on either idea as its main.