Sorry, love. Gotta save the world

Rating: Null/10 (13 March 2015)

"We're not going to hear our politicians talk about population, because we have an economic system dependent upon perpetual growth. When you have such a system, you need an ever growing population to sustain it. But no one will admit to this. I've asked politicians, why don't you admit to the truth, that we can't always have growth? And the main answer I get is, well, you can't say that. Any politician who doubts that we can have exponential growth forever is put down or attacked." - Dick Smith
"In the event that I am reincarnated I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to overpopulation." - Prince Philip
Matthew Vaughn's "Kingsman: The Secret Service" opens in a generic Middle Eastern country. Here generic white secret agents known as Kingsmen battle generic brown bad guys. These secret agents are led in the field by Galahad (Colin Firth), a generic spy-hero modelled on Ian Fleming's James Bond and Len Deighton's Harry Palmer.
"Kingsman" quickly introduces us to Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), a generic super-villain who has infinite resources, henchmen, secret lairs and technology which exists only to propel the film's generic plot. Thankfully the Kingsmen have similar generic technology, which similarly allows them to magically explain plot points, propel the film's generic plot and eavesdrop on various generic characters. Why write a good script when everyone in your film has access to a computer which tells everyone what happened, what to do, where to go and who is who?
Midway in "Kingsman", we learn Richmond Valentine's nefarious plans. A deranged environmentalist, Valentine hopes to cull Earth's human population, killing billions so that man's negative effects on the planet can be reversed. Spared from Valentine's slaughters are earth's wealthiest inhabitants. The poor die so that the rich can live.
But the Kingsmen also ooze wealth. Dressed in the finest clothes and surrounded by dazzling cars and posh mansions, they are seen as something to aspire to. Case in point Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton), an unemployed, lower class Londoner. Like he's stepped out of a Ken Loach film, Eggsy lives in a generic simulation of 1950s "kitchen sink drama", abused mom and all. He escapes this hellhole thanks to Galahad, who explains to Eggsy that social class distinctions make no man better or worse than another, and that anyone can be upwardly mobile, if only they inject a little hard work and perseverance. In other words, being posh is nothing to aspire to, but it is, and everyone can be posh, but really only those who deserve to be. The film's scrambled ideology isn't surprising considering that Matthew Vaughn's a fervent conservative, made videos for the Tory party and is related to King George VI.
"Kingsman's" second act finds Eggsy and several other generic young men and women being trained by Galahad to become Kingsmen. Thanks to generic training montages, they quickly develop into resourceful murderers. Of course Eggsy, a wisecracking non-conformist, becomes the film's best Kingsman; nothing facilitates conformity more than the illusion of dissidence.
Now with his own private army of super-kids, Galahad launches a little war on Valentine. Cue much hyper-stylised violence, so immaculately choreographed as to be devoid of any thrill, danger or spontaneity. People get stabbed, head-shots are delivered and corpses "humerously" accumulate.
Because everyone in Vaughn's film is a random amalgamation of cartoonish traits, nothing in "Kingsman" has any dramatic weight. People fight, we don't care. The film ends with our heroes defeating Valentine, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, as per Vaughn's own rules, environmental collapse is coming anyway. Final scene? Eggsy saving the day, rescuing a princess and then being offered anal sex, a "darkly comedic" take on the "flirtatious" scenes which end virtually all James Bond movies.
Like many contemporary superhero films ("Kickass", "Chronicle", "Defendor", "Super" etc), "Kingsman" attempts to be "irreverent". Swearing, casual brutality and randomness are presented as being "cool", and postmodern cut-and-pasting is presented as being "daring". Elsewhere the film's aesthetic plays like a cross between Zack Snyder, Guy Ritchie and a coked out Miley Cyrus, albeit with conservative shout-outs to Reagan, Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.
Inept and witless as an action comedy, "Kingsman" is nevertheless somewhat politically interesting. A bit like Chris Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises", with its "evil environmentalists" and its hero who thinks "humans aren't ready for clean energy", "Kingsman" presents environmentalists as wealthy bad guys who work with governments and rich dudes to screw the unsuspecting masses. The film doesn't treat the findings of environmental scientists as being wrong, but it nevertheless presents environmentalism as being pushed by those with ulterior motives; environmentalism as an elite project to foster global depopulation. In the real world, of course, the truth is precisely the opposite. Capitalism, orthodox political policy and short-sighted zillionaires are the chief opponents of environmental scientists. The latter believe "sustainable capitalism" to be an oxymoron, the former pay lip-service to "green business policies" in order to keep doing business as usual. "Kingsman's" Malthusian obsession with birth rates is itself a red-herring long favoured by elites. To accept the premise that environmental problems are driven by population, and not the built-in growth imperatives that characterise capitalism's system of commodity production, is to miss the point environmental scientists have been making for decades. Economists like John Foster state this clearly: "Population growth cannot be examined apart from the economic system in which it is embedded. Negative or zero population growth poses serious problems for a capitalist society which always requires new markets, and always requires a continual expansion of both the labour force and the relative surplus population of the unemployed, all in order to meet the needs of production and profits." Of course nobody going to "Kingsman" cares about any of this. Who cares about logarithmic scales when you can sodomize a princess?
5/10 – Worth one viewing.