Taron Egerton is talented youth who is misusing his skills and doing nothing with his life. When he is bailed out of jail by Colin Firth he begins to train to become a Kingsman, before he has to stop Samuel L. Jackson’s plot to send the world mad.
Ok, let’s start off with the good things about Kingsman. The action sequences are genuinely incredible. There is one scene involving a church in which I had Goosebumps. And just throughout the action is incredibly well shot, and fantastically intense and stylish. I really liked the class rift element portrayed in the film, there is actually one speech delivered by Taron Egerton that describes the snobbery inherent in the British system brilliantly. I thought the villain actually had a relatively believable motive, and I was pleased to see a disabled person being represented. The black humour throughout is very strong and produced quite a lot of laughs, I would also like to congratulate whoever chose the soundtrack because the use popular songs is superb.
However, there is also quite a lot of bad. In terms of female characters it would be wrong to call them badly written, because that would suggest they had been written at all. There four women in the film, we have your typical evil sidekick (their interpretation of strong female character would appear to be a female that is physically strong), with no development whatsoever, other than she has really cool swords. We have the Mum, who is there purely as a motivation device for the protagonist. We have Roxanne who could have come very close to strong well developed character, but they decided not to do that and gave her no backstory and focused on the central male protagonists achievements instead of hers while they were essentially equal. The less said about the Swedish princess the better to be honest. The film also ends on a slab of lad humour that even for the rest of the film feels out of place and horribly awkward. It’s actually a massive disappointment that it ends like this (it’s not quite right at the end, it’s the bit before the first bit of credits) because it leaves you with this aftertaste from the movie that you shouldn’t have when the rest of the film was so damn good.
Overall, despite Samuel L. Jackson telling us “this isn’t that kind of movie” (referring to the typical silly bond film) it really is. The first three quarters of the film I thought were absolutely superb. But the ending is just a bond ending in the worst way possible.
7/10
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