A few days ago I wrote:
The Oscars? Oh, I'd hoped Interstellar might win a special Academy Award for Most Intriguing Villain for Matt Damon's portrayal of insane megalomaniac scientist "Dr Mann". Alas not. But the other night I went to see the Colin Firth spy caper Kingsman, and once again the world-domination super-villain was a climate-change madman, played by a lithping Samuel L Jackson, who manages to recruit an Obama lookalike president to his deranged scheme.
We had a bit of mail about this from people who thought that meant I was arguing it was a "conservative" movie, or wanted to know why I would recommend a picture with an anal-sex joke and a bazillion f-words in it. So I figured I might as well expand my observations:
Kingsman: The Secret Service is a kind of meditation on British spy movies. It's not a spoof of 007 - from Matt Helm to Austin Powers, we've had a thousand of those, and Bond himself trembles on the brink of self-parody. But Kingsman does play around and up-end the conventions, starting with its basic premise: if you're going to have a spy in bespoke suits, like Connery, Brosnan et al, why not actually locate the spy agency inside their Savile Row tailors and thereby make style and substance, so to speak, seamless?
That's a cute notion - as are the film's reminders, however, that stylish accoutrements will only get you so far. Kingsman begins with a natty British agent performing a daring mountaintop rescue and going into the shaken-not-stirred shtick over a tumbler of Scotch only to be sliced in two by the baddie. And it ends with the traditional bit of Roger Moore eyebrow-cocking sexual innuendo being taken away from the legover maestro and instead rendered as a very blunt proposition by the posh totty.
All these bits of business are entertaining and easily explained by reviewers: instead of the Bond girl being on the receiving end, the closing gag empowers the woman, etc, etc. And it's precisely because much of the rest of the film can't be interpreted quite as reassuringly that critics seem to have been baffled. The old country-house murder mystery used to be dismissed as "snobbery with violence", but Kingsman is snobbery-with-violence on testosterone: Colin Firth limbers up by beating up a pubful of knuckle-dragging effin'-'n'-bllindin' Brit yobs after one of them ill-advisedly suggests Mr Firth's character may be seeking to procure a rent boy, and then dear old Colin does the same thing across the Atlantic on an industrial scale to a church congregation whose principal offense seems to be that they're stump-toothed rednecks. Some critics seem to have been expecting the film to "subvert" notions of class, which is hard to do when Colin Firth spends the entire picture ass-kicking rubes who are worse-dressed than him. To be sure, the redneck congregants hold unenlightened views on fornicators, sodomites and abortion-providers, but the US scene seems to owe less to any ideological antipathy than to the latter half of Kingsley Amis' condescending sneer that he'd finally worked out why he didn't like America: "Everyone's either a Jew or a hick."
This is why liberal commentators seem to be befuddled by the film, a state nicely captured by the headline appended to one bewildered pajama boy's take over at Vox.com:
The new spy thriller Kingsman is a hugely entertaining movie with ultra weird politics
And these days in Hollywood a film's "politics" are meant to be so plonkingly signposted that you know from the beginning who you're meant to boo and who you're meant to cheer. In the climate-change era, the earnestly brain-dead The Day After Tomorrow from a decade ago is the gold standard. In Roland Emmerich's film, a speech by Dick Cheney leads to (warning: plot spoiler) the flash-freezing of the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Boo! Bad Cheney!
The pampered, priviliged survivors of a consumerist society need to learn how to survive in a cold, hostile landscape, and fortunately there's a helpful homeless man with a friendly dog, and he's full of useful tips about how to huddle in very cold temperatures.
Hurrah! Who doesn't like homeless people? We weren't there for him, but he's there for us!
And, thanks to his survival techniques, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum and the gang hole up in the New York Public Library and start burning the books for warmth.
Boo! Book-burners are Nazi, right? And anyway the library's full of wainscoting which would burn longer and give off more heat. Er, well, Emmerich got a little confused here, although he did eerily anticipate the current state of climate alarmism in which Michael E Mann and his fellow ayatollahs are gleefully torching papers by Willie Soon, Judith Curry, John Christy, etc.
At any rate, Emmerich's soon back on track and, with the entire United States frozen solid, Americans start fleeing south. So - get this - the Mexicans close the border. And then - oh, the irony! - the fleeing Americans are forced to swim across the Rio Grande!
Hurrah! Who's undocumented now, huh? The ol' boot is on the other foot, eh?
But just in case you miss the irony and the ceremonial swapping of the boot, Emmerich explains the southbound tide of illegals to you via a TV news voiceover: "And now in a dramatic reversal…"
That's how a Hollywood blockbuster is meant to address climate change - by telling you what to think every step of the way.
Because Kingsman isn't that kind of earnest yawneroo, nervous critics find themselves pausing in mid-laugh to wonder whether the premise of the jest is entirely sound. I was sad to see my old friend Anthony Lane in The New Yorker succumb to this syndrome and fret as to whether having a wealthy black villain serve his dinner guest a McDonald's Happy Meal on a silver salver might not be, gulp, a wee bit racist.
READ THE REST HERE
http://www.steynonline.com/6834/kingsman-the-secret-service
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