new to DVD: Kingsman: The Secret Service

On the surface, Kingsman: The Secret Service may seem like just another action comedy about spies. We've all been down this road before. The action scenes. The seemingly innocuous items that turn into weapons or life-saving gadgets. The villain who wants to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and the villain's bizarre henchman. And so on. And so on. Yes, we've seen it a million times before. You either like this kind of movie or you don't -- or maybe you once did, but you've seen so many of these types of films that you've started to feel like, "meh, seen one, seen 'em all."

But that's just the surface. I imagine that open-minded film professors will one day be showing Kingsman in their classrooms, and if that vision doesn't come to pass, shame on academia. Kingsman is a truly postmodern entry into the spy film genre. And oh yeah, despite its flaws, it's a heck of a lot of fun.

Taron Egerton stars as Gary "Eggsy" Unwin, a young man who may be athletic, brave, and resourceful, but whose life is going nowhere. Eggsy's only interests seem to be hanging out in bars, picking fights, and stealing cars. Then one day he meets Harry Hart (Colin Firth), a dapper man whose expensive suits and upper-class demeanor stand out like sore thumbs in Eggsy's poor neighborhood in the East End. Harry reveals that Eggsy's long-dead father was an accomplished member of a secret network of spies, the Kingsmen -- and that Harry would like to tap into Eggsy's own unused potential by recruiting him into the organization.

Most of the film consists of Eggsy's adventures while training to become a member of the organization. The Kingsmen initially recruit a whole classroom's worth of young men and women, but then reveal that they'll all be competing for only one available position within the company. Each training exercise is a test, and we watch as Eggsy's classmates are eliminated from the running one by one as the tests grow increasingly difficult.

Meanwhile, Harry investigates a string of disappearances of prominent people across the globe, and his investigation leads to software magnate Richmond Valentine. Maybe any number of people could have effectively played Valentine, who, in many ways, is a standard Bond-type villain -- but Kingsman gets a lot of mileage out of casting Samuel L. Jackson in the role. It's true that Jackson has become a caricature of himself as a performer, but he makes no apologies for it, and by embracing his persona, Jackson makes the role seem as if it was written specifically for him.

What makes the movie postmodern is that it blends every stage of the development of the spy-movie genre into one unique experience. Kingsman both celebrates and pokes fun at the conventions of the spy genre, and its characters are highly aware of their other fictional counterparts. Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne are both fleetingly mentioned, Harry's appearance is deliberately reminiscent of John Steed, and there is a lot of talk about the James Bond films. There are scenes of outright parodic silliness, clearly an intention of the filmmakers to spoof Bond and his kin, but there are other scenes that are fun in their own right. As a director, Matthew Vaughn is a master of spectacle and style, and as Harry Hart, Colin Firth gets two amazing fight scenes that are breath-taking in the brilliance of their choreography, worthy of Jackie Chan's finest work.

My only caveat is that there are a couple of scenes that do cross the line. This is an action movie, so violence is to be expected, but one of those scenes is so gruesome that the scene isn't as fun as it should be. Later on, there is a scene of a child in danger, so pointlessly disturbing and shamefully manipulative of audience sympathies that it really belongs in a completely different movie.

But overall, Kingsman works. Jackson's villain is a lot of fun, the test sequences that make up the bulk of the movie are inventive, the script is less predictable than you might expect, and Vaughn is a masterful director of this type of genre. That's my kind of movie.