Based upon the acclaimed comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, it's funny, action packed and its comic-book violence is extremely excessive in the hands of imaginative British visionary Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class).
Vaughn plays with the conventions of a well-known genre - twisting and subverting, but never denigrating, them. "It's a modern love letter to every spy film ever made, but told in a very irreverent, fun way," he says. "I wanted it to be truly entertaining and capture the spy films of the 60s and 70s in a modern manner. Kingsman: The Secret Service is very postmodern in the sense it has a lot of references to those films, but it's reinventing them."
Ultimately, it's Bond on speed and wryly subverts the conceits of the spy genre, telling the story of a gentleman spy who takes an ordinary working-class kid under his wing and trains him in the art of espionage. It's about a street kid's journey from one social class to another, set in the two colliding worlds of life and death adventure and a very ordinary street existence. "The film is a blend of everything I learned from making Lock Stock, Snatch, and Layer Cake, which were gangster movies, as well as my comic book films Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, notes director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn.
Adds co-writer Jane Goldman: "Matthew's got such a love for the James Bond movies, and Kingsman: The Secret Service is about embracing that genre, while also doing something new with it. Matthew's been talking about doing a spy movie for years - even back when we were working on [Vaughn's 2007 fantasy film] Stardust."
It was on the set of the genre bending Kick-Ass that Vaughn and noted graphic novelist Mark Millar conceived the concept for what would finally become Kingsman: The Secret Service. "We agreed we wanted to explore the origins of an elite spy, but focus on an unlikely candidate," says Millar.
Millar told Vaughn about a newspaper article he had read about how Terence Young, who directed the first Bond picture, Dr No, had cast Sean Connery against the wishes of 007 author Ian Fleming. Fleming had seen 007 as more of a James Mason or David Niven type. Says Millar: "Young realised he had to turn Connery, this rough Edinburgh guy, into a gentleman, and before they started shooting the film he took him to his tailor, to his favourite restaurants, and basically taught him how to eat, talk, and dress like a gentleman spy."
That conversation started the ball rolling on creating Kingsman: The Secret Service, but it would take a few years before Millar began writing The Secret Service graphic novel, upon which the film is based.
The Secret Service rolled out onto the shelves of comic book stores in February 2012, telling the story of a gentleman spy training his street-punk nephew to be the next great secret agent, and exploring two co-existing sides of British culture.
Meanwhile, Vaughn was fleshing out ideas for the film version with his co-writer Jane Goldman. The pair has collaborated on all of Vaughn's films to date, and they created the new script as Millar and Gibbons were producing the comic, in much the same way Vaughn and Goldman had approached the adaptation of Millar's in-progress Kick-Ass story.
"Matthew and Jane work together so brilliantly," notes Millar. "Whatever you give them it always comes back better. There's nothing lovelier than seeing your book adapted and actually being better than you had imagined."
Vaughn and Goldman were keen to make some changes to Millar's story and take Kingsman: The Secret Service in a slightly different direction. They crafted a back story for the organisation that was slightly less governmental, and the gentleman spy was no longer the street-punk's uncle, but a former colleague of his father's, who'd lost his own life saving his.
Kingsman is an elite organisation of operatives working outside of the government. Martial in style, they are an altruistic unit that gets things done. "They're the good guys," says Colin Firth, who plays Harry, whose Kingsman name is Galahad, named after the Arthurian legend. "We're living in an age in which we're very suspicious of our institutions and our governments. Whatever trust we've once had has been undermined, so I think it's interesting to explore the idea that there is an organisation with pure motives. One not compromised by the politics and bureaucracy of these institutions. The Kingsmen are the modern-day Knights of the Round Table."
The gentleman spy is a classic trope of British cinema, from the authentic view presented by the John le Carre novels - the lonely sleuth - to the high-tech, high-testosterone fantasies of the 1960s' James Bond films. Firth, who played Le Carre's Bill Heydon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, relished the chance to explore an action hero. "What Matthew does so skilfully is to find a way of harvesting bits of all of them," he says. "So you have a bit of [author Len Deighton's spy protagonist] Harry Palmer, a bit of Bond, and a bit of Le Carre, and it's all there for the sake of entertainment.
"The palette and the sensibility of Kingsman: The Secret Service is somewhat old-fashioned: the gentleman spy," he continues. "It's elegant: the cufflinks, the suit, the gadgetry built into the umbrella. It's also futuristic and quite outrageously makes the implausible plausible."
In fact, he says, the role appealed to the eight-year-old version of himself who relished playground fantasy. "The film has that element of exuberant, high-action and larger-than-life make-believe, where you have clear-cut heroes and villains who can do anything. There's a form of superpower here. We're not people who can fly, but we have gadgets that can do the impossible, from lighters and pens, to blades in our shoes."
Harry feels responsible for the death of Eggsy's father, and that he owes the man a debt. When a Kingsman agent is killed, the organisation looks for a new recruit. Explains Firth: "When Harry sees that his fallen comrade's son, Eggsy, is on a fast track to disaster in the way he's growing up, Harry rises to the challenge of seeing if he can save the boy. That's partly guilt, but he wants to see if he can mould Eggsy into Kingsman material. He says quite explicitly that being a gentleman has nothing to do with accents or upbringing; it's something one learns and proves in one's behaviour."
More than 60 young actors were screen-tested before Vaughn met Taron Egerton, a 24-year-old from Aberystwyth, Wales, and fresh out of drama school. With no film credits to his name, Egerton was working on a television drama when his agent presented him with some Kingsman: The Secret Service script pages and told him to prepare for an audition the next day. At the audition, Vaughn told Egerton he'd like him to come back and read with Colin Firth. From Egerton's first meeting with Firth, the two actors bonded. "His talent is extraordinary," notes Egerton of his acclaimed co-star. "I'd have paid for the masterclass of working alongside him, let alone be paid for it."
If you are a fan of spy and action films, with a twist of mystery and quirky adventure, Kingsman: The Secret Service offers perfect entertainment and absolute escapism with bite.
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