Who would have expected that Austin Powers (first instalment Jay Roach, 1997) would have spawned a subgenre? Not me, but no big surprise, or lament either, as The MacMahonian has its brow high as comfortably as low as medium as no. The Powers franchise has inspired emulators even in France, e.g. the equally entertaining and equally vapid OSS 117 series (first installment Michel Hazanavicius, 2006, featuring the now famous Jean Dujardin). Stateside, recent examples include the recently released Mortdecai (David Koepp, 2015, featuring Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow – seen it, a few OK jokes, all in all not boring but basically silly, will not review it individually) and Kingsman: The Secret Service.
Kingsman is the 5h feature film directed by Matthew Vaughn. His previous output is mostly superhero stuff (Kick-Ass and X-Men franchises) I didn’t see. I seem to recall having seen his first feature, Layer Cake (2001), but not much about it…
Kingsman tells the story of Gary "Eggsy", (Taron Eggerton), recruited by senior agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth, who amazingly isn't fed up with playing himself over and over again) to join an ultra elite secret service corps. It's sort of 007 meets Colonel Clifton (pretty sure the majority of the anglosphere isn't familiar with the second reference: 60-90s french-belgian cartoon series featuring a retired British army officer involved in detective /spy adventures, basically a francophone farcical spoof of Englishness and James Bond/Sherlock Holmes types, check it out at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_(bande_dessin%C3%A9e). Incongruously, the super-agents are recruited exclusively from an aristocratic background, and Harry is trying to prove the establishment wrong by recruiting and successfully training cockney reject Gary. As the class struggle proceeds by numbers, enter the requisite super-villain with the requisite plan to destroy the planet, Richmond Valentine (Samuel L Jackson, unrestrained) assisted by Gazelle (Sophia Boutella) a hottie/martial arts expert who has blades for feet. Eventually Valentine is subdued and “Eggsy” emancipated (don't tell me this is a spoiler alert!).
Kingsman is like a (not very) thinking man's Austin Powers, with a bit less jokes and a bit more CGI action scenes, a lopsided crypto-Marxist subtext and some occasional, and methinks superfluous, eschatological/sexual incursions into Farrely Brothers territory, which however don't manage to spoil the fun… On the evidence of Kingsman, maybe The MacMahonian should consider examining Vaughn's previous output. In Kingsman he accomplishes the hardest thing in this genre (hereinafter christened by The MacMahonian as “the Bond Touch”): to ensure that the comedic/ironic tone is sustained throughout but not so that it annul dramatic tension.
The MacMahoninan verdict: solid fun. No more, no less. It is what it is and for what it is it is enough.