Something of a high-wire act, but one pulled off with aplomb. Catch it

Rating: 7/10 (20 June 2015)

I've seen some good films - some very good films - mediocre films and downright bad films, but I know very little about film-making because I've never 'made a film' or been involved in making a film and the chances of me doing so are rather less than celebrating my next birthday on the Moon. But of one thing I'm certain: in many ways film-making is something of a high-wire act: with all the talent in the world at our beck and call it can, and often does, go horribly wrong. There again it can, against rather steep odds, also come off admirably, and with Kingsman: The Secret Service writer/director Mathew Vaughn (and I suspect his long-term co-screenwriter Jane Goldman also deserves a mention) has most certainly pulled off, with apparent ease, a daunting task.
First, during the height of the Cold War, we had the straight-faced James Bond films (and others were made at the same time presenting the same sentiments) with those nasty Rusky communists as the 'baddies' and the West and apple pie as the 'goodies, although the Bond franchise began to play if more for laughs, perhaps realising just how ludicrous it all often seemed. Similar ventures, though, most recently the Bourne franchise, carried on playing it straight, but shifted the emphasis away from politics to out-and-out action.
Bourne and the rest blatantly catered to the armchair thug in all of us who likes to imagine himself - very rarely herself, I should think - up there with all the smart moves and seemingly inexhaustible energy. Others - Rowan Atkinson, Mike Myers, and just a few months ago Paul Feig with Spy - ditched any pretense of serious intent and simply went for laughs.
Vaughn and Goldman - I do think it is best to see them as a team because an excellent script (I am told) is the sine qua non of great film-making - have tried something far more ambitious in the number of angles the cover. Not only do they give us a Bond character battling it out with an evil villain intent on world domination (or, here, world destruction), but at the same time they choose to send it up but without pulling the rug from under their own feet. They also provide all the quite impossible gadgetry we expect a 'Bond' character to have at his disposal - at one point Colin Firth as the central figure takes his protégé (a very capable Taron Egerton) from Savile Row in central London to deepest Hampshire (I should think) in an underground mini bullet train on a journey of at least 30 miles - now how would that have been secretly built at a cost of billions of pounds? And to cap it all, the film flirts with self-reference, a practice that almost always ends in tears but here doesn't.
Firth, our 'Bond', and a very watchable Samuel L. Jackson as the evil and mad villain, complete with a ludicrous Mike Tyson lisp, even discuss 'the kind of spy film they watched as kids'. But then Vaughn and Goldman ride a coach and four through many of those films' conventions - when he finally meets Firth, baddie Jackson explains he won't spend several minutes outlining why he is doing what he is doing and he shan't, as was the convention, set up the 'Bond' character to die a lingering death from which our Bond would be bound to escape, he simply . . . well watch the film.
But there is even more to Vaughn and Goldman's action-packed spoof than that: they even manage to introduce an additional hero, a very likable lad from the wrong side of the track (Taron Egerton, referred to above) who is set against a gaggle of upper-class toffs and manages to hold his own with aplomb. Portraying the British class system in films and some chipper 'working-class' lad who gets one over the toffs is a high-wire act of its own, but Vaughn and Goldman manage it.
Some reviewers here lambast Kingsman for its violence, and I can't deny that there is a great deal of it - to put it bluntly, an awful lot of people die. But, for this viewer at least, the violence isn't in the slightest bit nasty and gratuitous and isn't sadistically lingered upon as is the habit of some grubby film-makers.
This film, which is based on a graphic novel, gets away with showing it because it is so utterly unreal and. And one scene in which - spoiler alert - the heads of several hundred of the worlds great and good gathered in villain Jackson's lair all explode like some expensive firework display, played to Edward Elgar's Pomp And Circumstance, had me laughing out aloud: it was all far too ludicrous to cause offence and very funny indeed.
Vaughn and Goldman - I still think that although Vaughn directed, both should get equal credit for what we are shown on screen - most certainly pulled off a high-wire act and then some.
Undoubtedly luck was involved (as were several hundred other collaborators - I've just looked at the credit list and yet again reflected on just how their essential contributions are never acknowledged), but luck follows talent - you'll never get anywhere on pure luck.
Catch this if you can, because you are in for a treat. Yes, it is all quite ludicrous, but in the best possible sense.