A crass and ultra-violent assault on the senses.

Rating: 3/10 (9 March 2015)

There is something deeply unsettling about sitting in a movie theater surrounded by people who are laughing as, on screen, heads are exploding, limbs are being hacked off and a princess rewards her rescuer with anal sex. The film starts out on a promising and engaging note as we follow the recruitment and training of the protagonist. But then, at about the midway point, things get terribly weird and weirdly terrible. This is not just movie violence but violence-porn, violence for laughs, violence that glories in being shocking and over the top. The movie itself, in terms of film-craft, is disposable and forgettable. But what sticks with me is a nagging feeling that what I've just watched--in the guise of a movie purportedly about a refined British spy agency--is a marker of the decline of Western civilization. Kingsman is the Roman circus for the 21st century, and every bit as brutal and pointless.