In a sentenceColin Firth clears a pub without creasing his suit, and the film spends two hours trying to top it
A Savile Row tailor’s shop is the front for Kingsman, a private intelligence service whose agents take their names from the Round Table. Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton), a south London teenager who has dropped out of the Marines and lives with his mother Michelle (Samantha Womack) and her thuggish boyfriend, steals a car, is arrested and rings a number on a medal his dead father left him. The call brings Harry Hart (Colin Firth), codename Galahad, who clears a pub of hard men with an umbrella and puts Eggsy forward for the Kingsman selection run by Merlin (Mark Strong), alongside Roxy (Sophie Cookson) and the sneering Charlie (Edward Holcroft). Meanwhile the tech billionaire Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) is giving away free SIM cards worldwide, has kidnapped Professor Arnold (Mark Hamill), and keeps a bodyguard, Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), who runs on blades.
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Matthew Vaughn’s spy comedy is faster, funnier and more violent than the Bond films it ribs, and Colin Firth in a bespoke suit is a pleasure. It is also crude when it means to be cheeky, and the finale mistakes a bloodbath for a punchline.
Matthew Vaughn has made a Bond film for people who loved them as boys and now think they have become too polite. Writing again with Jane Goldman, he puts a spy service behind a tailor’s shop on Savile Row, gives its best agent to Colin Firth and sends him to recruit a boy from a south London estate. Then he turns the violence up past the point where it is funny and leaves it there. The result is 129 minutes of considerable fun with a sour aftertaste, and we are still arguing with it.
Firth is the reason to see it. Harry Hart walks into a pub, locks the door and puts six men on the floor with an umbrella, and Firth plays it as if settling a small bill: no grimace, no quip until the work is done, hair back in place. He has spent twenty-five years being asked to be decent on screen, and the pleasure here is watching that decency hold while the body count rises. Taron Egerton, as Eggsy, is a proper find, quick and unselfconscious, and the scenes in which Harry teaches him to stand, drink and dress are the warmest in the film. Mark Strong’s Merlin runs the training with a clipboard and a Scottish burr and gets the best dry lines.
The craft is sharp. George Richmond shoots the fights in long, swooping takes that stay close to the bodies, so when a brawl runs the length of a room we can see where every blow lands. Eddie Hamilton and Jon Harris cut to the music rather than against it, and there is a sequence in a church, set to a single guitar riff, that is the most precisely staged violence Vaughn has put on screen, the camera moving as if it were one of the combatants. Paul Kirby gives Kingsman green leather and mahogany and gives Valentine white curves like a phone shop. Arianne Phillips’s suits carry the film’s argument on their own: a double-breasted pinstripe is the shape Eggsy is being asked to grow into. Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson supply brass and a wink at the Bond themes of the sixties.
That church sequence is also where the film caught us out. We laughed at the first few seconds because the choreography was so clever, and we were still laughing a minute in, and then we noticed what we were laughing at and stopped, and felt slightly ill. We are fairly sure Vaughn wanted the laugh and had not planned for the stop. The film treats a massacre as a dance number, and it is a good dance number, and that is the problem.
Samuel L. Jackson plays Valentine with a lisp and a baseball cap and a horror of blood, which is funny for one scene and then is simply what he does. Sofia Boutella’s Gazelle is the best henchwoman in years, and the film knows it, giving her the one fight that is frightening rather than exhilarating. Michael Caine sits in a club chair as Arthur and disapproves. Sophie Cookson’s Roxy is the only recruit who can keep up with Eggsy, and the script is more interested in him.
The last half hour is where it comes apart. Vaughn and Goldman spend the film sneering at the rich and the powerful while filming their tailoring with love, and they never settle which of those they mean. The big finish depends on a great many people dying in a decorative way, and a final gag involving Hanna Alström’s Princess Tilde is a leer dressed as a joke. It is the kind of thing a film puts in to prove it is not afraid of anything, and it proves the opposite.
Kick-Ass (2010) pulled off this trick with a schoolboy and a foul-mouthed child, and the shock there was the point. Layer Cake (2004) showed Vaughn could be lean. This one has the pub, Firth, Egerton and about forty minutes of the best-cut action in a British film for some time, and it has a finale we would rather not have seen. See it with people who will laugh, and do not pretend afterwards that you did not. It carries a 15, and earns it.
Most critics come away entertained. The reviews describe a loud, irreverent revival of the gentleman-spy film, and the praise gathers around Colin Firth, who is named again and again for a dry, poised performance that carries the action as comfortably as the tailoring. Matthew Vaughn’s set pieces draw the next most comment, the church sequence in particular, and several reviews single out Taron Egerton as a convincing new lead with easy chemistry opposite Firth.
The spread is wide, from near-raves to one-star dismissals. The reservations cluster in three places: a final third that several critics find choppy or sluggish, violence that tips from playful to numbing, and a politics some find smug and a closing gag many find tasteless. The Guardian finds it charmless and stuck in a lad-mag past, while Slant Magazine calls it crass and low-stakes. Even the admirers tend to concede it misfires; they simply enjoy it anyway.
Sexton finds the film hugely enjoyable, praising its stylish, outrageous take on the gentlemanly spy tradition. He singles out Colin Firth’s performance as one of his best roles in years.
Read the full review →The critic calls it a vibrant, irreverent spy caper that revives the gentleman-spy tradition with gusto. Colin Firth’s pithy performance is singled out for praise.
Read the full review →Mottram finds the film a lively, entertaining return to playful spy adventures, though it loses some momentum in its final third. He especially praises Colin Firth’s action performance and the film’s irreverent energy.
Read the full review →The critic finds Kingsman entertaining and gleefully depraved, despite its increasingly brutal violence. He praises Matthew Vaughn’s elaborately choreographed action and the film’s ability to make its cartoonish characters matter.
Read the full review →Hewitt finds the film uneven but ultimately an exuberant, envelope-pushing blast of spy-movie fun. He especially praises its audacious, ultra-violent action and the lively chemistry between Colin Firth and Taron Egerton.
Read the full review →Debruge finds the film a playful, irreverent and stylish revival of the British spy formula, with a promising new star. He praises its inventive action and comic flair, while noting that its glossy materialism sits uneasily beside its critique of extreme wealth.
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The Ipcress File · not reviewed yetThe gentleman spy in glasses, before anyone thought he needed an umbrella.
Kick-AssVaughn and Goldman’s earlier go at the same joke, with the shock still fresh.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.Guy Ritchie’s sixties spy caper: better tailoring, far fewer corpses.
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of SpiesFrance sends up its own Bond, and the idiot hero is the joke.
Hot FuzzBritish politeness meets American carnage, and the carnage knows it is funny.
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