The gentleman spy

Rating: 6/10 (11 February 2015)

Kingsman wants to be a lot of things. A James Bond homage mixed with The New Avengers and a touch of The Man from Uncle. Lets throw in Eastenders as well with scenes set in a council estate pub. Taron Egerton plays the young hero Eggsy and Samantha Janus plays his mum.
Kingsman is an independent spy agency with an Arthurian leaning which operates out of a gentleman's tailor shop. When one of the agent dies on duty, Colin Firth nominates a small time criminal (Eggsy) to be a replacement. Eggsy's father was also a Kingsman once.
All the nominees go through a tough selection process. At the same time the organisation investigates the mysterious disappearance of some celebrities and the actions of a well known philanthropist and cyber billionaire Valentine played by Samuel L Jackson who is concerned about climate change and wants to give away free sims, free phone calls and internet.
Valentine obviously watched that episode of Doctor Who where the dastardly villain used mobile phones devices to control people's emotions.
Director Matthew Vaughn as with the Kick Ass films uses strong humour and cartoon violence although in this film, the violence has a video game footage look about it. I do think an anal sex gag at the end was misplaced!
The film is entertaining enough, makes you laugh a few times but lacks a lot of originality. Maybe the comic book it is based on is itself been inspired by many other film and TV sources.
In short its a fan-boy remake of a James Bond film from the Roger Moore era. However hearing Samuel Jackson describing spies and megalomaniacs also reminded me of the film Unbreakable which itself was about people with superpowers and super-villains and Jackson had a major role in that film as well.