Film Review - Kingsman: The Secret Service

The music through the opening credits, Dire Straits hammering out Money For Nothing in true 80's nostalgia, and the links to that video in the way the credits themselves roll out, give a great lead in to the idea that this isn't going to be a 2015 style spy movie. In a world where the likes of Bourne and Bond are tending more towards a (very) stretched version of realism, Kingsman goes old school with a ridiculous premise and a crazy bad guy with an impossible scheme to destroy the world and a ridiculous henchwoman. 

The ridiculous goes from there, and gets equally silly and fantastic but seems to manage the balancing act of never taking itself too seriously but never getting too silly. 

The action fight scenes with Colin Firth are strange, but in a good way. He turns his hand to the action hero role a lot more readily than I expected. Spoiler - Once he is killed off the remaining cast struggle a bit to carry the film to it's conclusion.  

Mark Strong's Scottish(?) accent wanders around a bit too much for my liking. And Samuel L Jackson's lisp is just strange. The secondary characters are a little underdeveloped, relying on stereotype to fill the gaps and the female characters even more so. At over 2 hours long already this has to be forgiven a little but I would have preferred slightly less of the action sequences in favour of a bit more story. 

There are some great sections where the bad guys try to justify their schemes and actually put a decent bit of story and morality into the movie. Mark Hamill is wasted, but no worse than Jack Davenport is.

One thing that really did bug me though was that some of the ruder jokes and unnecessary swearing could have been cut back. In many cases the swearing for effect became swearing for the sake of it and the scandinavian princess bits are completely unnecessary. 

Somewhere around the 7 or 8 out of 10 but I am going to go for 7 just for some of the little niggles.