‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’: proof that one bad scene can ruin a perfectly good movie
What do Casablanca and No Country for Old Men have in common? Perfect endings.
You might want Rick and Elsa to fly off together into the fog, but if they had, it’s likely that Michael Curtiz’s classic would not be one of the most beloved and revered Golden Age romances nearly a century later. As for No Country for Old Men, there is a boldness about ending it on a quiet, cryptic moment of reflection in which Tommy Lee Jones’ character relates two of his dreams. It leaves you with questions to ponder, but not a single loose end.
Kingsman: The Secret Service, on the other hand, ends with an anal sex joke. Comedies automatically get a lower bar than any other type of movie because ridiculousness is built into the genre bone. However, if the ending is both ridiculous and completely lacking in humour, then there is no excuse. It would have been so easy not to have this scene, or it could even have been kept in and slightly rewritten. Instead, it ends the film on a very literal bum note that, and if you’re a person with a shred of conscience, will make you feel unclean.
Directed and co-written by Matthew Vaughan, it stars Taron Egerton as a young new recruit to the top-secret spy agency, Kingsman. As James Bond parodies go, it’s mostly excellent. It gets the style right, it’s fast-paced, and nearly drowned out by smartassery. Egerton is charming as Eggsy, a rebellious ne’er-do-well bursting with talent and one-liners, destined to be the UK’s most valuable agent. The plot revolves around the apprehension of Samuel L Jackson’s Richmond Valentine, a wealthy American mastermind who, like all great Bond villains, is trying to wipe out most of humanity.
Unlike Austin Powers, it takes just as fetishistic an approach to three-piece suits as the 007 franchise. Unfortunately, it also deviates from Mike Myers’ spoof by completely failing to make misogyny funny. While the female names in Austin Powers like Alotta Fagina and Ivana Humpalot are not particularly classy, they aren’t that dissimilar from the names of actual Bond franchise characters like Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead, making the comedy accurate and so absurd it’s actually hilarious.
Kingsman, on the other hand, gets much more sexually explicit than Bond has ever been and fails to offer a punchline. Valentine has imprisoned several world leaders who do not comply with his plan, with Princess Tilde of Sweden, played by Hanna Alström, being one of them. When she meets Eggsy from behind bars, she tells him that if he succeeds in saving the world, “We can do it in the asshole”. Cute. When he does, in fact, save the world, she keeps her promise, rolling over on her stomach to reveal said body part.
You might think I’m purposefully leaving out some mitigating factors here, but I’m not. It’s the least funny version of schoolboy humour you’ll find in a Hollywood movie, The Hangover franchise included. Vaughan has tried to save face by claiming that he actually did an enormous amount of research into how Bond movies end on sexual innuendos. This was very scholarly of him, and we should all commend him for his efforts, but if you’re going to have your protagonist do something so crass and misogynistic, don’t spend the entire lead-up to that point portraying him as a loveable hero.
