Silly, sexist and annoying

Rating: 3/10 (20 December 2016)

OK, this isn't entirely awful. Much of the acting is OK, Sam L is typically amusing and quirky and Firth isn't bad as a poor man's John Steed, though the main character's attempt at cocky assurance mixed with chip-on-shoulder inferiority (I think that's what he's trying for) is more irritating than anything. Pacing is fine – it keeps moving right along. The blades are a great idea and Boutara wears them well, though it would've been cooler to cast a real paralympian in the role, and why not as hardly any acting was involved. I've heard worse screenplays, though it could have been a lot funnier. It's better than the latest Bond movies, but then, what isn't? However it's extremely annoying for two reasons.
First it's very silly. Some of those who liked the film suggest it is parody and therefore is entitled and indeed expected to be silly. Depends what you mean by parody though, the definition: "an imitation of something with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect". That could well involve silliness, but this isn't hugely exaggerated compared with the stuff it's supposed to be parodying, and it's never that funny, apart from a couple of Sam L's lines. Both The Avengers (I mean the 60s UK TV show, not Downey Jr & pals, though this also applies to them) and the old Bond movies, extensively referred to here, are funnier than this without being considered either parodies or comedies. Silly on its own is not funny, especially when too many tough-guy movies intended to be taken seriously, involve the same kind of silliness. Example: this cliché that some guy can defeat large numbers of supposedly tough and trained enemies by leaping around in the middle of them in silly ways (see John Wick, The Equaliser and a million others), hinges on one thing only – the supposedly trained enemies cannot manage to shoot him from five yards away. Breathing round a toilet bend in a flooded room is not funny, it's stupid. Breaking glass thick enough to hold the pressure of ten feet of water with an underwater punch is not funny, it's stupid. Austin Powers is parody. Coburn's Flint is parody. Doing silly unfunny things a million other movies have done, or unfunny things so stupid no-one else would ever do them, is not parody, it's copying and idiocy respectively.
Second reason. It's deeply sexist because: they are kings-MEN; the essence of their approach is to be John-Steed-gentleman imitations (no idea why they don't wear bowlers but at least the umbrellas have survived); all existing kingsmen were male; even when a female becomes one she is given a male name.
It probably thinks it isn't sexist because: the most (in fact only) effective bad-guy is female; it allows women to try out to be kingsmen; one of them wins the try-out, beating out our male hero.
But it is really because: even olde-worlde patriarchal sexism has never had a problem with either female villains or demonisation of women in general, going back to Morgan le Fay (to keep up the Arthurian parallel) it's female heroes sexism can't cope with; while Roxy is winning the try-out, she's the only one to be shown whining, 'I can't do this,' and to need helping out by our male hero; though Roxy is the qualified kingsman and our male hero is not, he gets the all-important gentleman's suit, while they didn't bother to make her one; she's subsequently sidelined on a stupid pointless mission, which she completes but still achieves almost nothing; while our male hero is defeating all the bad guys single-handed in the usual silly way, she is falling to earth and floundering around in the snow. Can't they give the only qualified female kingsman even a support role in the mayhem? Of course not. They just want her out of the way so our male hero looks bigger and badder.
More than half a century ago, the UK Avengers was one of the earliest action series to depict female agents (Cathy Gale, Emma Peel) as equal to their male counterparts in every way including the physical. It's rather pathetic that this wholly inferior ripoff has gone back past the 50s to Neanderthal times – and I doubt the reason is even misogyny, more likely ignorant carelessness.
Just very annoying. 3/10 is generous.