Plot Details: This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Miss Manners on Steroids
Plot Overview
We cut from an automatic search program on a cassette player to the Middle-East, 1997. A helicopter ferries in two gunmen to take out the guards, then some rockets blast a desert compound. A voice on the radio broadcasts, “We have secured Falcon,” then they start a quickie interrogation, but “Falcon” has other ideas (BOOM!) The team leader Harry Hart, aka Galahad, (Colin Firth) having (“Shit!”) “missed it” welcomes acolyte Lancelot (Jack Davenport) into the secret spy service known as the Kingsmen. Hart brings condolences to Lee's (Jonno Davies) widow Michelle (Samantha Womack) in London and meets her little son Gary, aka Eggsy, (Alex Nikolov) and offers to do him a favor some day.
Argentina, seventeen years later, Lancelot is doing surveillance on Professor James Arnold (Mark Hamill) who gets himself kidnapped by a team of professionals (“Everything is clean.”) Lancelot intervenes and subdues them, but then he himself is ambushed by a fleet-of-foot femme fatale who goes by Gazelle (Sofia Boutella). She lets her big boss Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) in the door who himself has “no stomach for violence.” He lets others do his dirty work while he hatches schemes for world domination.
Back at Westminster the Kingsmen begin a “selection process for Lancelot's replacement.” At this time Eggsy (Taron Egerton), now in his early 20s, has called in that favor to get out of trouble with the law for having nicked a bloke's car. Hart takes him under his wing (“His father saved my life”), and nominates him as a Kingsman candidate. He sees in him an unfulfilled potential: “Huge IQ. Great performance in the Marines, but ya gave up. Drugs, petty crime, never had a job. It all went tits up.” We get to see whether “You can transform me like ‘'My Fair Lady'’” to “save the world” before the hostage goes tits down.
Ideology
The watchword of Hart is [spoken slowly & deliberately]: “Manners maketh man.” Billionaire Valentine achieves instant popularity worldwide when he announces the free distribution of SIM cards compatible with everyone's cell phone, giving them: “Free calls. Free Internet. For everyone. Forever.” He comes across as a lover of humanity.
Prof. Arnold comes across as a bumbling intellectual unaware of any conspiracy that would provoke all this interest in him. He espouses a theory that the Earth is a living organism (called Gaia) that will seek to expel a damaging parasite on it's surface, namely Man. Valentine believes him and has plans to cull the herd (depopulate the world) before that happens.
Valentine needs to do a system test first, and he's chosen a “hate group” in Kentucky, at the South Glade Mission Church. They will get blamed for any mayhem that ensues. Its preacher is very vocal (“And I say to you …”) and the congregation very responsive (“Bear witness!”) as he deplores the government when it “condones sodomy, divorce, abortion.” The movie itself makes us sympathetic to: a princess in a dungeon who in desperation will commit sodomy to escape that dark hole, a widow who “want[s] my husband back”, and a harried mother who is thankful she didn't murder her crying baby from a locked room. To oppose “sodomy, divorce, and abortion” can be explained in terms of ordinary human sympathies without resorting to hatred, so the characterization of them as a hate group is an overreach. Their sermon America is Doomed and its discussion is nothing other than the robust debate that America's freedom of speech constitutionally guarantees, there's no need to stigmatize it as hate speech. In fact there's even a biblical form of the Gaia theory when God commands men, (Lev. 18:22) “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination,” and tells us, (Lev. 18:24-25) “Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these … the land is defiled: therefore … the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.” In point of fact, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans right at the time of their Freedom Days parade glorifying homosexuality. It makes one wonder. At any rate a vigorous theological debate is not so much different from the intellectual ramblings of a bumbling professor, but the former is stigmatized.
The signal sent over the modified cell phones is meant to stimulate aggression and reduce inhibitions. The real problem in that church was nobody turned off his cell phone for the service, being a lack of manners that “maketh the man.” Sound expert Seth S. Horowitz, Ph.D. has written: (108)
You're on a train or a bus, trying to read, sleep, or just not look at the guy across from you, but the person behind you keeps chattering into his cell phone. Whether he does it loudly or even just as a constant soft susurration, we still find listening to someone's half of a conversation to be consistently annoying. A recent study by Laura Emberson and colleagues found out why, and it has to do with the dark side of attention. They discovered that while hearing a normal conversation was not significantly distracting, hearing a half conversation—a “halversation,” as they called it—caused a serious decrease in cognitive performance. Their hypothesis was that background monitoring of unpredictable sounds results in more distraction for a listener engaged in other tasks. Because you can't predict the direction of half a conversation, you get more unexpected stimuli, and thus more distraction.
This is consistent with Solomon's saying, (Eccl.
10:11) “Surely the serpent will bite without
enchantment; and a babbler is no better,” and even the
New Testament, (1Cor. 15:33) “Be
not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.” The
world is already a tense place. “Kingsman” was released
nationwide 02/13/15, the day before Valentine's Day. Valentine is
also the villain's name. In my review of the movie, "Valentine's Day"
I pointed out the
roots of Valentine's Day, how an
Italian priest named Valentine married couples contrary to the Roman
emperor's decree that forbad his soldiers to wed so he could have an
undistracted fighting force. The priest was caught and on the eve of
his execution penned a note to a supporter, signing it: ‘Your
Valentine.’
There you had a conflict between church and
state over marriage, and today in Kentucky is a similar conflict,
but regarding same-sex marriages. The world is a tense place, it always
has been, hate aside, and Valentine's global chart of cities lighting
up—New York, London, Rio de Janeiro—as he activates their
cell phones does not bode well for peace on Earth. “[O]ne thing
that is consistent in studies of emotion using techniques ranging
from nineteenth-century psychology through twenty-first-century
neural imaging is that one of the most important and fastest-acting
triggers for emotion is sound” (Horowitz 113). This movie
is a powerful promotion of manners, in particular the need to take
our cell phone conversations to a private, not public, space, and
to teach that to our children when we give them their own.
Production Values
“Kingsman: The Secret Service” (2015) was directed by Matthew Vaughn. Its screenplay was written by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. It stars Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, and Samuel L. Jackson. It looked like all the actors were having fun, but I can't really consider these serious roles; it was more a (skilled) spoof on the James Bond franchise. Jackson in particular fit the profile of a Bond villain: his speech was serpentine sibilant, his cocked cap made him look shifty-eyed, and he was black. Eggsy kept his cap brim pointed skyward to allow him an expanded visual field for when he practiced parkour. His sartorial style markedly improves with a tailored suit and he also loses that awful working-man's brogue. The music was energetic and the CGI dazzling. MPAA rated it R for sequences of strong violence, language and some sexual content.
Review Conclusion w/ Christian Recommendation
I generally don't like movies based on comic books; I find them flat, but this one wasn't as bad as some. I guess I was infected by the fun energy of the thing and didn't take it too seriously. I really don't like the distraction of the all too frequent cell phone conversations I'm forced to hear in public, so I'm glad to see a movie that addresses this breach of manners. I'm giving it a pretty high rating and recommendation, higher than I expected to.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Well done action flick. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Absolutely amazing special effects. Video Occasion: Fit For a Friday Evening. Suspense: Several suspenseful moments. Overall product rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Horowitz, Seth S., Ph.D. The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org