A while back I was having a chat with me ol’ pal Chris about what makes a good Bond Movie. In my mind the ingredients are: humour, suaveness, Britishness, gadgets, girls, & world domination. But over the past decade (pretty much since Daniel Craig stepped into the role), Bond movies seem to have sacrificed some of those elements in favour of ‘realism’, and in so doing they’ve become somewhat ‘meh’ – they’ve actually lost their quintessential Bondness.
As if to prove my point, ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’ has all of those Bond-essentials in spades and as such feels more like a Bond movie than anything else I may have seen in the past ten years. I actually sat in the cinema and felt somewhat nostalgic.
That said it’s definitely a film for a modern audience: It has the same sort of gloss that you expect from a superhero movie – rather than ‘grit & shadows’ that you’d assume a spy movie should have – but unlike a superhero movie it’s extremely violent. And somewhat gory. Maybe too gory. In that respect it appears to borrow from some of the more ridiculous horror movies – and I’m not a huge fan of horror movies. But that’s just me.
It’s interesting to see Colin Firth playing the action hero though, which he pulls off with considerable ease.
Anyway, I enjoyed it, I’d watch it again in a heart beat and I hope there’ll be a sequel (though without giving too much away I can’t see how they’d be able to do that) – but it’s definitely one for your Potential Boxing Day list.
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