Bargain Basement Bond For The Brain Dead

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2015)

I remember seeing a clip from Kingsman a year before the film came out. It was that great fight scene in the pub and it generated loads of excitement and anticipation in the crowd that viewed it at Wondercon. Who knew that scene was the highlight of the whole movie and it all went down the drain from there like a sludgy turd?
It's simply amazing to me that a film that should have been such can't miss material managed to do almost everything wrong. Dumb, predictable, crude, sexist, unfunny to anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature and violent to the point of grotesque, Kingsman just devolves from scene to scene into a miasma of stupid.
I generally have no problem with movie violence, but Kingsman simply disgusted me. When a film tries to sell itself as a quirky Bond send-up, suddenly dumping a metric ton of Evil Dead-esque hack and slashing (most of which is being committed by the film's ostensible hero) pretty much destroys the tone and makes clear that the filmmakers haven't a clue what they're doing. The pathetic stabs at unPC satire are, likewise, amateurish and eyeroll-inducing.
Probably the single biggest dim-bulb move, however, is systematically killing off anyone in the cast remotely interesting, including the nominal star, Colin Firth, who is denied the dignity of even making it as far as the final half hour (though it's entirely possible he insisted on it after reading through the whole script).
Since everything these days, no matter how vile and utterly devoid of merit it may be, is granted a sequel, we will apparently be getting a Kingsman 2. And how thrilling to know it will star the bland, charisma-free twenty-something leftovers from K1, whose names and faces I'm struggling to recall even though I watched the film less than an hour ago. Yes, nothing says a good time at the cinema like watching the human equivalent of vanilla pudding.
In sum, if you really want to see a Bond-like film, go see a Bond film! Or watch the British Avengers series, or The Incredibles, or track down a copy of In Like Flint. Anything up to and including watching test patterns and infomercials for incontinence care would be time better spent than watching this thing.