Kingsman: The Secret Service Preview Review

Just to let all who read on know, this is a SPOILER FREE review.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a movie very loosely based on the comic book The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. The movie is written by Jane Goodman and Matthew Vaughn, who also directs. This is the same team behind the similar Millar comic adaptation, Kick Ass.
The film, unlike its unfortunate title, is anything but clunky. It is a slick, fun, R Rated, filthy humour and ultra violence filled romp that plays like an intentional love letter to Roger Moore era James Bond.

Kingsman in both its humour and action, plays a lot like Kick Ass did before it and like Kick Ass the movie contains plenty of awesome jaw dropping and taboo busting moments. Vaughn also repeats the trick of editing the fight scenes to a retro soundtrack that, while not exactly giving Guardians of the Galaxy a run for its money, is still damn cool.

The actors all appear to be having a great time and mostly play the whole thing straight, even when the situations are anything but. It's sad then that some of the dialogue is occasionally knowingly winking at the audience and slips into heavy handed referential moments. It never spoils the scenes outright but everyone should already be getting the joke without turning this into Austin Powers with gore. Colin Firth, Vaughn staple Mark Strong and newcomer Taron Egerton are all particularly superb. Firth, not always the first name you think of as cool or a fantastic ass kicker steps up in this and steals the show.

Samuel L Jackson's lisping, brightly costumed villain may be the tipping point for some because while he is undeniably fun and knowingly over the top, the film might have been better served by having someone with just a little bit more menace. You could still have the Bond villain like plot, mountain lair, henchmen and almost-superhuman sidekick with a singular weapon while having just a touch of genuine menace to the main, big bad. Even Donald Pleasence's Blofeld was sinister in his own way.

The directing is assured and excitable with the fight scenes, in particular, being a stand out because while they are very kinetic, you can tell exactly what is happening at all times. There's my usual reservation about CGI, especially where limb hacking or fake blood is concerned and something like Kill Bill 1's prosthetics and make up effects would've worked better here. The myriad of nods to old 60s and 70s romps, usually starring the perpetual eyebrow raising of one Sir Roger Moore or maybe Peter O'Toole, are a joy to anyone, like myself, that genuinely loves that kind of stuff or grew up with it. You can't be cynical in a film like this, be along for the ride or don't bother. It asks you to sit back, have fun and suspend belief from the opening scene onwards.

The nicest thing though about the whole thing was just how occasionally surprising it was and how it contains sequences and scenes you just can't quite believe you are watching on the big screen. Like Kick Ass, Vaughn and Goodman are unafraid to show you images that have been common place in some of the more fringe comic books but rarely, if ever, make it to the screen of your local multiplex. They also unashamedly put in the kind of jokes that you may tell your friends in a bar after a couple but, again, rarely if ever get an airing for mass consumption. It's a messy, exciting, enjoyable, cool, breezy breath of fresh air.

The Director, Matthew Vaughn, who briefly introduced the screening I was at, said that distributer Fox was unsure of its potential in America because the film was "very English". This may explain why Fox messed around with the release date a few times and why, sadly, the trailer spoils so much of the film attempting to 'explain' it. As for the Englishness or not of the film, I don't think Fox has anything to worry about. It will happily ride the wave of the current Anglophile (Brit loving geek) nostalgia boom that is sweeping America with the likes of TV Shows Sherlock, Dr.Who and Downton Abbey.
It also has more than a few echoes of James Bond which has always been a big hit in The States.
Plus it has every American's favourite older Brit Colin Firth in it being undeniably awesome and giving Liam Neeson a run for his money in the action stakes.
If there is one very British aspect to the movie it's that it has absolutely no regard for authority and is joyously, ridiculously subversive on all fronts. It certainly will make you either proud to be British again or wish you were British, which certainly makes a change from the Brits always playing villains.

The audience I was with applauded several times throughout and very loudly at the end. If you enjoyed Kick Ass, like Dr.Who/Sherlock, like James Bond, like comic books or long for the days when movies were made for the kid inside every adult and not just for dumb kids then Kingsman is for you.

I would strongly urge anyone now intending to see it on its US release date of February 13th 2015 to avoid the trailers as much as possible and go in fresh. Your experience will be enhanced greatly. 

Remember the days when trailers didn't spoil the whole first 2 acts of a film?

4 out of 5 bullet proof umbrellas

The King's Speech - 9th February 2011

The King's Speech, or The Stuttering Firth as it shall now be known from here on in, was one of those films that I had wanted to see for a while and actually I wished we'd gone back when it first came out, before I read all the hype about it, because I feel that, whilst it was a good film, it didn't live up to it's pre-award show and pre-Oscar buzz.
The things that were great about it, first and foremost, were the central performances. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, when on screen together were both spectacular and I think that was one of the areas where the film, for me, didn't live up to it's trailer or the press, there simply wasn't enough of Rush and Firth. They really make this average British costume film swing and soar in all the right ways and I came out wishing the film had been twice as long and simply just stuffed from start to finish with the Firth/Rush pairing. Helena Bonham Carter is not bad either but she doesn't really have much of a part to play with. What part she does have, however, she plays perfectly well and also, there was a fairly decent attempt made to make her look quite similar to the Queen Mum. Next and probably last on the list of central pleasing performances was Guy Pierce who I didn't think was too shabby in the part of the infamous King Edward, you know, considering he's Guy Pierce.
Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi get fairly thankless roles (although if a film has stuttering in it Jacobi has it in his contract that he has to be there) and I didn't understand why they couldn't have found Gambon a realistic beard, probably because they'd spent half the budget on fattening up an already ludicrously jowly Timothy Spall in what is one of the most hilariously misjudged Churchill impersonations ever committed to screen.
Still these really are tiny nitpicks in a grander, better film with strong watchable leads.

As well as Firth and Rush the film is worth seeing for its sumptuous cinematography and well judged recreations of pre-World War II London although, apparently, before World War II, London was draped continually in a thick grey cliche fog, which, I am sure, was actually a cheap way to allow the film makers to cover up anything that wasn't 'of the period'. The direction isn't bad and the framing of the scenes is very often purposefully artistic and almost like a painting, especially in the scenes in Logue's sumptuous office; however, in an attempt to make every shot a winner, the director occasionally messes with the eye lines of the characters and the sides of the screen on which they sit, which is annoying for the viewer and can sadly drag you out of the action.

The last thing I really loved about the film, and this is probably a personal thing as I am an ex-pat Brit living in The States, although I am not particularly a royalist and am fully aware the film is, at least in part, a work of fiction, seeing Britain back then during that dangerous and nervous time but also with it portrayed as brave, unapologetically proud, filled with proper English gentlemen all with a sense of duty and honour did make the old stiff upper lip quiver a little with the odd bout of patriotism.
You see there is an England, or I guess a Britain in my head, that lives in a place outside time, that probably never  really existed but is instantly recognisable and appealing. It's Britain as a decent, polite, benevolent rather than an aggressive empirical nation full of green hills, country pubs, rousing music, culture and honest salt of the earth workers. Far from the sad image of council estates filled with underaged smoking single mothers watching pop idol and reality TV in a privatised, mismanaged and feeble country that leans too heavily on it's American cousins. Instead it's the fantasy of the Britain of Shakespeare, Dickens, Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling all set against the music of The Kinks and The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, with a few belted out verses of Jerusalem thrown in for good measure.
A list like this would, ultimately, be too long to go into here and I guess I find it a bit hard to find any real value in what goes on today, who knows maybe time will be kinder but A Stuttering Firth really brought all those rose tinted ideals and possibilities out in me again along with a deep rooted patriotism that I think all Brits should carry with them and which is far more important than simply football.

Back to the film and on the downside I would say that the film struggled with whether it was a historical retelling of a fairly forgotten story during a very well known period or an embellished and some what made-up work of semi-fiction about two men, one who happened to be an ex-actor speech therapist and the other the King of England. I only say this because I felt that they didn't focus on the two men enough for it to be the latter but missed out way too many important bits of information, especially for those not in the know about who everyone was meant to be, for it to be the former and so, for me, what ended up happening was, whilst I appreciated the back drop and context that the story of Bertie and Logue was being set in, every time they weren't on screen together I felt a lot of the scenes became superfluous. It was almost like the script didn't have the confidence in itself to just be a smartly written comedy-drama double header and so tried to cram in snap shorts of historical information that really, while sort of relevant, with all that was going on at that time, could've filled three movies, or a mini-series.

I am also amazed it's played as well as it has done in America because while something like The Queen did a great job of explaining the pomp and tradition of royalty, I felt there were big gaps where, if you weren't knowledgable about the era or the nature of a monarchy, you'd possibly get quite lost.

So, all in all, it was a fairly well written, ok directed, tremendously performed film with beautiful cinematography that completely deserves the acting awards it has won and been nominated for but I am not sure it should get much else. It's always nice to see an essentially British film doing well though.

7 out of 10 swan casseroles
Points from the Wife 8 out of 10