If you doubt that movies today are made for adolescent boys...

Rating: 2/10 (7 June 2015)

If you doubt that movies today are largely made for adolescent boys (or men who still think like them) then you haven't seen Kingsman: The Secret Service.
And the fact that this film did well at the box office makes me think that the Samuel L. Jackson character, Richmond Valentine, is right about humanity's bleak prospects.
I feel dumber for having seen Kingsman. In particular there is a lecherous- even predatory- interaction at the very end between the lead character "Eggsy" and a Scandinavian princess that is a gratuitous contrivance to denigrate and sexualize a relatively strong female character.
The message in this movie is that the world can only be saved by wealthy white men who have avoided the estate tax and that the true evildoers are those who believe in climate change....oh, and Barack Obama's head explodes - all of which kind of torpedoes the notion of liberal Hollywood.
The film has a promising start in the direction of James Bond for the 8-second attention-span world. Initially the action is so silly and over the top and the characters so absurdly two-dimensional that it's hard to take it as more than mindless popcorn fun.
There's also some witty dialog between Colin Firth's Galahad and Sam Jackson's Valentine that menacingly send up traditional spy-movie tropes. A few bracingly cold-hearted twists occur during the new-agents' training that let you know the movie will not be trafficking in many feel-good clichés.
But then Kingsman devolves into an unimaginative morass of dehumanization and schlock and eventually the film becomes little more than a first-person-shooter video game. Literally, there is a scene in the film's climax where the action briefly switches to Eggsy's perspective as he runs down a corridor shooting henchmen that is indistinguishable from a commercial for a combat shooter video game.
Firth and Jackson are likable. Michael Caine is- well Michael Caine being an Englishman. As Eggsy, Taron Egerton is entirely interchangeable with any other young actor and equally as forgettable.
I have often thought that Hollywood serves as a pretty good counter-argument to the notion of free markets naturally producing the highest quality to meet the public's demand. That Kingsman: Secret Service did well at the Box Office and will no doubt spawn bigger, louder, dumber, more violent and retrograde sequels only serves as a depressing reminder that crap sells and sells well.