Review of Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015) by Tgdrox — 16 Feb 2015

A great plot and likable characters are muddied by an unnecessary amount of F-bombs and over the top violence.

The movie had a great plot. Yeah, it was vanilla. It was plain, but people buy plain. Vanilla sells. Colin Firth uses his suave and cool to his advantage. Mark Strong barely does anything and still manages to be one of the best parts of the movie. I don’t remember seeing Taron Egerton before this movie, but he’s cool. Samuel L. Jackson’s character had a unique and believable evil plot, and he had a believable motive.

I don’t mind F-bombs in movies. An F-bomb is a great tool in the hands of a writer, and can be used to convey an extreme emotion, as it is an extreme word. That is exactly why I don’t like it in this movie. They lost their meaning and became stupid sentence filler. If you replaced every F-bomb with “shucks”, the movie would be hilarious.

The violence was completely unnecessary. I’m fine with killing in movies. Bad guys can kill a huge amount of innocent people, it makes you hate them and root for the good guy. The good guy can kill an inordinate amount of bad guys. They got what was coming to them, and the innocent people they killed are finally avenged. The grotesque violence didn’t serve its purpose. You would never try to get Hitler over as a bad guy by showing the Holocaust with “born to be wild” in the background. But the scene in the church did just that. Something awful was happening, and they played rock music, because it was supposed to be “fun”.

The movie markets itself as “fun”. I think a thesaurus is necessary for the marketing department, because “fun” is not a synonym for “stupid”. The gore-porn that happens in this movie doesn’t even serve a purpose, it’s there just to be there.

And while I’m on the subject of the church scene, I know that nobody likes Westboro, but even the most demented, sick minded psychopath wouldn’t wish for what happened in the movie to happen to someone who just happened to disagree with them, even if their opinion was stupid and wrong.

They try extremely hard, with the excess of F-bombs and over the top violence to tell you that this movie is not just another spy movie. Without the F-bombs and violence, it is just another spy movie. It’s a good spy movie, but it is vanilla. But they try to trick you in to thinking it’s not by taking you to cold stone and mixing in heath bars. Sorry, frozen heath bars get stuck in your teeth. You just ruined what could have been good ice cream. The movie itself tries to tell you it’s different, almost flat out. Sam Jackson literally says “It’s not that kind of movie”.

You’re not fooling me.