An old, tried and tested story in new shiny packaging.

Rating: 3/10 (6 May 2015)

I watched Kingsman without any prior knowledge of the film, and without having seen the trailer, and as such my expectations were reasonably low. Because of that I didn't walk away disappointed, but at the same time I feel that there at least two serious things wrong with this movie: 1. Samuel L. Jackson's performance is painful to watch. It's 'Snakes on a Plane' bad, maybe even worse. His lisp is forced and unnatural, and it constantly makes you wonder if it's some kind of stab at gay men.
2. A young, rough around the edges character gets picked up by a secret agency to replace an older agent, has to go through some training, and then has to try and save the world? Where have I heard this before? Men in Black? Wanted? Any number of other films? It's old goods in a new packaging.
Warning, some pretty major spoilers below: 3. Suspension of disbelief fails. The action scenes are pretty and well done, and I could accept the hyper-violence at face value, as something that occurs in this comic book universe that the film works in, but it drops the ball on so many other important areas. First of all there's no adequate explanation of how or why the protagonist goes from street kid to bad-ass super spy.
We're simply expected to believe that being dipped in water and jumping out of a plane, somehow trains you to be able to take on 50 men armed with machine guns, and come out unscathed. Then we're expected to believe that biometric security systems are impenetrable to hacking. If it involves a scan of your hand, it can never be hacked into apparently. Or how about that brilliant billionaire villain, who is determined to carry out his plan, but designs his doomsday device so that it only works as long as he's physically pushing a button on it. He can't flip a switch, it has to be pushed continuously, giving the hero ample opportunity to stop the event. It's the antithesis of Veidt in the Watchmen.
Where suspension of disbelief died completely for me, was when the villain explained how he convinced state leaders, presidents, royalty and celebrities to join cause with him. His solution to global warming is to cull most of the world's population, and somehow these leaders of the world are all in agreement and support his plan? The whole film they're building up to this event, this massive catastrophe that will occur at the hands of Jackson's character, and you're expecting something really clever, a twist or a turn or some rationale that would justify world leaders going on board with this insane plan, and then Jackson spouts a few lines of weird Malthusian-extremist rhetoric, in that weird lisp of his, and that's that. No adequate explanation is ever given.
I didn't believe any of these things made sense, even within the film's hyper-violent cartoon universe. It felt like they were so busy making all those violent action scenes, nobody stopped to think... hey is this even making sense?