“I’ve had an epiphany,” cries the snapback-wearing Samuel L Jackson. Remember when Jules from Pulp Fiction decided to “walk the earth”? Turns out the walk finished on quite a low; Jules has been enjoying a career as a badly dressed, parody Bond villain. In this capacity, his second post-Pulp Fiction epiphany, involves culling the human race and thereby saving the planet from anthropogenic climate change. It’s the pretext for a story which, like Jackson’s character, can’t really decide how seriously it wants to take itself.
At one level, the answer is not at all. You can feel the glee of Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn as his characters balletically shoot, chop, and generally emaciate each other with escalating improbability. In this regard one of the most playful elements of the film is Colin Firth’s character: essentially Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones after a few karate lessons. Like Vaughn, you can tell he is loving it. Indeed, after a series of frankly ludicrous fight scenes, you start to think that perhaps this is an exorcism of his secret frustration for missing out on Bond. In one scene, he uses an umbrella to win a bar fight before sending the barman into an amnesia coma with a dart from his watch. Imagine a drunk Tarantino directing a hybrid sequel of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Men in Black.
The reason for the shenanigans is that Firth is a super secret agent in the employment of the Kingsmen. The Kingsmen are a shadowy apolitical agency that maintains world order without the burden of pesky democratic mandates and the like. Don’t worry though, their leader is Michael Caine, so it must be for the best. This agency dispatches our hero Eggsy, a teenager from a council estate, to an X-Men inspired countryside mansion to compete with other young would-be spies.
The training montage that follows makes up the backbone of the film. This is one of defects of the film because it doesn’t offer much beyond the usual Full Metal Jacket stuff. Admittedly the formula is reinvigorated when at one point the cast of the Riot Club seems to have got to the wrong set and make a cameo. Their contribution doesn’t amount to much beyond: “Oxford or Cambridge?” [observing Eggsy’s lack of tie] “ah must be Durham”.
This encounter with snobbery betrays the fact that at another level the film does take itself seriously. There is an undercurrent of social commentary on how social inequality stifles meritocracy. While this is very worthy, the film makes the point in an incredibly ham-fisted way. Eggsy’s backstory is as clichéd as the innumerable spy film references: single mother upbringing, involvement in crime, abusive stepfather, council estate misery et cetera. What is worrying is that unlike the spy references, this insulting (almost Daily Mail level) caricature is presented without a touch of irony.
This inconsistency in tone also reveals the odd political message. Outwardly, it is sterilized of any politics – Jackson’s zealous environmentalism is decidedly post-political, the Kingsmen are adamantly apolitical. Yet the context of inequality that ultimately drove Eggsy into this fantastical world is surely a political issue. And yet it is through Eggys’s triumphs in this apolitical world that the film makes good the political failings that placed him in such a situation in the first place. This fantastical resolution to a very real social problem effectively de-politicizes the quest for a solution. With such a message, is it any wonder our generation won’t vote?
The film is riddled with such inconsistencies in tone and message. At the level of a good night in, Vaughn’s clumsy vision mixes the cool of Bond, the excess of Tarantino and the naivety of Disney. Unsurprisingly it leaves a nasty aftertaste. Sadly in light of the hidden politics of the film, the sense that something is not quite right is a symptom not only of poor direction.
Vaughn, shows up the clichés, but ultimately delivers even bigger clichés, dangerous clichés. Most worryingly, it is the un-ironic depiction of the less well of and their salvation through the pseudo meritocracy of the upper class, which sticks out most. Vaughn gets away with this by constantly ironising the story with indicators that let us know, that he knows that its all tongue in cheek. This self-awareness has the effect of authenticating the clichés he chooses to leave unexposed.
This also explains the popularity of Vaughn’s work. Like Kick Ass before it, Kingsman navigates the cold uncertain world of postmodernity to deliver the easy stories and easy solutions that commercial cinema gave us before deconstruction. He achieves this by adopting the form of postmodern film as if he were not delivering the same old rubbish. Herein lies his popularity, packaging old and possibly even reactionary stories, under the veneer of self-aware authenticity .The most regrettable part of all this is that he has moved from the facile morality of Kick Ass to the social conservatism of Kingsman.
