Kingsman: The Secret Service
This is a Bond film as directed by Tarantino, which leads to a black hole of bad taste. At least the villain is interessting.
The plot concerns a secret society of upper-class twits that murder foreigners for a living. Not the regular secret service, these are privateers that fight for a generic “world goodness” with the seemingly infinite funds of comic book economics. Jobs/Gates analogues as villains are for Antitrust, so this time it’s a Zuckerberg-like with a Malthusian plan for solving global warming. It involves a trojan horse that gives people free internet in exchange of giving away control over your phone to some megacorp in San Francisco. The main character is a chav with a heart of gold. His family issues lead him to a decrepit life even though he is bright and intelligent. He passes the recruit phase with flying colours, after laying bare the immorality of certain rules. After one of their tops agents is revealed to be a mole for the villain, it’s up to him to save the world from endless war.
Going by a synopsis like that you could almost imagine Syriana, Green Zone or even Black Hawk Down, but it’s nothing of the sort. The closest film to this is really Crank, with its senseless violence and over the top characters. While that was upfront about its sleaziness, this tries to hide it beneath a veneer of suits and umbrellas.
Apparently this was conceived as non-serious Bond film, but that ship has sailed, Austin Powers has colonised that space and it is very hard to displace. I don’t think I’m too old for gory comedies, but pick a damn tone and stick with it. How the fuck do you expect the audience to care about main characters dying when literally millions of people have their head blown up in mini-mushroom clouds? But what really pisses me off is the fourth-wall breaking quips.
I make me MAD. That scene in the church comes out of nowhere and goes down as a complete disgrace.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.