Director Matthew Vaughan (Kick-Ass, Layer Cake) sends his fetish for over-the-top chuckles and mayhem into an orbit of mostly unfunny inanity in the spy-flick send-up Kingsman: The Secret Service. Colin Firth, typically prim and proper and even more properly dressed, makes a valiant attempt to save the material from the abject failure it might have been in the hands of a lesser lead. Lisping villain Samuel L. Jackson brings no recollection of his sterling performance in Django Unchained to these proceedings. He seems to be going through the motions here as much as his nearly omnipresent TV commercial endeavors of late. Then there’s Michael Caine, who seems to be in a dozen movies a year of late, essentially playing the same character. In Kingsman he has a penchant for fine cognac and vapid, huffy dialogue.
The set up is this British spy agency that operates in the secret back room of a London Savile Row haberspdashesy. Thus we have eroding umbrellas, expensive shoes with hidden blades and all sorts of other sartorial wonders. Entering the fray is young street kid Eggsy (a good Taron Egerton) who, sitting in jail, calls upon Harry (Firth) an associate of Eggsy’s late father. Harry owes the boy’s dad, so he takes the lad under his wing. This includes a slot in a training program to be a Kingsman, the name of the secret spy agency in which his father and Harry are employed. Here we get a few amusing moments as the working class Eggsy competes with mostly snot-nosed upper-class brats. Some of the exercises devised by Kingsman Mark Stron are so crazy they’re wittily amusing.
Trouble is, the film soon graduates into a wearisome plot to overcome Valentine (Jackson) and his female sidekick (Sofia Boutella), who sports leg prosthetics that are actually a pair of sharp blades that whenever she gets angry. When she ends up taking on the forces of good in the film, Vaughan goes into slo-motion revery. Valentine’s game is to provide free wireless SIM cards to the whole planet and thereby drug each and every consumer into savage-alike behavior thus to induce population control and, of course, profit. When Harry himself becomes possessed while he’s undercover in a fundamentalist church pew, the resultant bloodbath is sure to provide a litmus test on whether or not you find this film mildly amusing or uproariously hilarious. With Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird on the soundtrack, Harry unwittingly wipes out the entire church. Coupled with a pretty amusing sodomy joke involving a Scandinavian princess near the film’s end, these scarce laughs will have to be enough to get you through this overlong, overwrought indulgence.
A Shaky But Not Stirring Spy Cocktail … 2.5 (out of 5) stars