Kings­man: The Secret Service

James Bond may have saved the world 23 times (and count­ing), but he nev­er got to fuck a Swedish princess in the arse. If that open­ing line is too rich for your blood, you might want to steer clear of Kings­man: The Secret Ser­vice, Matthew Vaughn’s brash, ultra-vio­lent spy caper pastiche.

Under­pinned by the same rule-break­ing brava­do present in 2010’s Kick-Ass, Vaughn’s pre­vi­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion with com­ic book writer Mark Mil­lar and screen­writer Jane Gold­man, this is anoth­er con­fi­dent, con­found­ing work from a direc­tor who nev­er ceas­es to sur­prise, whether he’s helm­ing a star-crammed fran­chise add-on or a mid­dle fin­ger-flip­ping anti-pres­tige curio. It’s a deliri­ous­ly enter­tain­ing, at times wild­ly mis­fir­ing con­trolled demo­li­tion job of a movie. Like watch­ing some­one who’s spent months care­ful­ly ren­o­vat­ing a Grade II list­ed coun­try estate sud­den­ly reveal that the entire place is wired to a com­i­cal­ly over­sized ACME brand TNT plunger.

Like Millar’s 2012 com­ic book series, enti­tled ​‘The Secret Ser­vice’, Vaughn’s film weaves togeth­er a con­spir­a­cy con­cern­ing the abduc­tion of Mark Hamill, a despi­ca­ble plot to achieve world dom­i­na­tion and a fic­tion­al British secret ser­vice agency’s blood­ing of a new recruit. The name Kings­man refers to a covert insti­tu­tion of dap­per dou­ble agents, who we’re intro­duced to in the form of Col­in Firth’s Sav­ille Row-suit­ed gen­tle­man assas­sin, Har­ry Hart, aka Gala­had. Tasked with find­ing a suit­able replace­ment for a long-serv­ing agent whose death he feels part­ly respon­si­ble for, Gala­had tracks down a coun­cil block yoof called Gary ​“Eggsy” Unwin (ace new­com­er Taron Egerton), whom he has rea­son to believe is made of prime Kings­man stock.

He may not know how to tie a Wind­sor knot, and has vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing in com­mon with his fel­low recruits – a bunch of tof­fee-nosed pub­lic school prats – but Eggsy’s street smarts are enough to see him through a pun­ish­ing train­ing pro­gramme at Kings­man HQ (almost) with­out a hitch. Vaughn has a lot of fun show­ing off his spy game exper­tise in these ear­ly boot camp scenes, affec­tion­ate­ly pay­ing homage to the genre while serv­ing up sev­er­al tech­ni­cal­ly impres­sive set pieces, most notably an exhil­a­rat­ing under­wa­ter sequence in which Eggsy and the oth­er rook­ies wake up to find their dor­mi­to­ry rapid­ly fill­ing with water. The adren­a­line only pumps hard­er from here.

Before long, Samuel L Jack­son turns up as a lisp­ing, tux-and-cap don­ning busi­ness mogul known sim­ply as Valen­tine, whose lat­est piece of must-have wear­able tech comes pre-fit­ted with the kind of sin­is­ter hid­den func­tion­al­i­ty only a Sil­i­con Val­ley entrepreneur/​evil genius could dream up. Com­plete with inflat­ed ego and an exot­ic (and lethal) female side­kick, Valen­tine is about as car­toon­ish and crass as super vil­lains come, though he’s still not as pre­pos­ter­ous as Javier Bardem’s Sil­va from Skyfall.

With the aid of Michael Caine and Mark Strong as Arthur and Mer­lin (essen­tial­ly the Kings­man equiv­a­lents of M and Q), Gala­had tracks Valen­tine down to, bizarrely enough, a West­boro-style church in America’s Deep South, where the bil­ious hate speech is drowned out under a hail of bul­lets and brim­stone. It’s an expert­ly chore­o­graphed scene of eye-water­ing car­nage (set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ​‘Free Bird’, no less), one that relies on the audience’s neg­a­tive pre­con­cep­tions of cer­tain extrem­ist reli­gious groups in order to jus­ti­fy the exces­sive blood­let­ting. Right or wrong, there’s an unde­ni­able per­verse plea­sure to be had in watch­ing Mr Dar­cy thrust the busi­ness end of his brol­ly into a hol­ler­ing bigot’s windpipe.

One thing that makes Vaughn’s work so dis­tinc­tive is his abil­i­ty to tap into the minds of 16-year-old boys. He knows what they want – name­ly lots of action, fast cars and sex – and how to give it to them. Yet his strength as a direc­tor lies in the fact that he makes films for adults. The sil­ly gad­gets, lav­ish under­ground lairs and snap­py one-lin­ers dot­ted through­out Kings­man are pure Flem­ing, and there are oth­er nods and winks to var­i­ous espi­onage touch­stones that will no doubt be lost on younger view­ers. For all its satir­i­cal pos­tur­ing regard­ing con­sumer cul­ture and the ever shift­ing par­a­digm of our class sys­tem, how­ev­er, this is a film that per­haps relies too much on its readi­ness to repack­age famil­iar, old-fash­ioned motifs into a know­ing­ly post-mod­ern car­ni­val of super­fi­cial thrills and tact­less dou­ble entendre.

Vaughn belongs to that select group of con­tem­po­rary film­mak­ers that pos­sess main­stream sen­si­bil­i­ties yet who seem to prize absolute cre­ative free­dom above land­ing a tidy pay­cheque. He’s had a few shots at direct­ing com­par­a­tive­ly safe stu­dio-front­ed block­busters before, of course, most recent­ly with X‑Men: First Class, but it’s good to see he’s still will­ing to com­mit to riski­er, more per­son­al projects. Grant­ed, Vaughn’s abra­sive, hyper-kinet­ic style isn’t to everyone’s taste, but you could nev­er accuse his films of being bor­ing – not when a gra­tu­itous impal­ing is deployed as casu­al­ly as a joke about anal sex. And that’s more than you can say about a lot of Hol­ly­wood direc­tors work­ing today.

Kings­man also con­tains the sin­gle great­est line of dia­logue deliv­ered by Michael Caine since his pro­found and meme-spawn­ing ​“Some men just want to watch the world burn” speech from The Dark Knight. Vaughn may not be a Jok­er-lev­el socio­path­ic mani­ac, but he’s no pas­sive bystander either. When the fuse is even­tu­al­ly lit and the world goes up in flames, you can bet he’ll be the one hold­ing the match.