Kingsman rating denies teen spy tale a young audience

My son was enthralled by the trailer for Kingsman: The Secret Service, but was denied permission to see the movie.

Colin Firth and Taron Edgerton in Kingsman: the Secret Service.

When our nine-year-old Fellini saw the trailer for the spy film Kingsman: The Secret Service, he was enthralled. And rightly so. It established a scenario that would thrill any young boy: a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks is recruited to a secret British spy agency.

Months later, the film arrived in cinemas with a MA15+ rating. Access denied.

I know many parents disregard, or don’t even notice, classifications but there’s so much good, relevant content out there for kids, DVD Letterbox doesn’t apologise for denying his kids a film with a “strong violence and coarse language” rating.

A kid doesn’t need to see a massacre in a pub or a man sliced in half, however comic the intent. And they particularly don’t need to hear the F-word dropped relentlessly. There is a context for the word, but the context that “we don’t want to be a kids film” is not a particularly progressive one.

Of course, there’s also that Faustian deal parents make with Hollywood’s comic-book-based movies. Yes, we will take our kids to watch your M-rated movies where entire cities or planets are destroyed and individuals are killed in increasingly inventive but ludicrous ways, as long as we don’t see a drop of blood or a naked breast. Pass the popcorn.

This is all a convoluted way of saying Kingsman: The Secret Service is a wonderfully inventive film that I would have loved to watch with my nine-year-old son. But can’t.

Matthew Vaughn’s film does things because it can, not because it should. If he’d thought harder about his language and violence, this could have been a huge family film. Because when it’s good, it’s very good.

Colin Firth is cast as the debonair English spy Galahad who recruits to his underground organisation“Eggsy” (Taron Edgerton), the working-class son of a former colleague.

Vaughn — who came to attention with his witty (but violent) Kick-Ass before toning it down a little with X-Men: First Class — is an excellent, if showy, director of action. If only he had realised that the scene in which Eggsy parkours away from a threat, or another where students have to work their way through a sky-diving exercise, is far more entertaining and inventive than more limbs being sliced off.

The film is full of spy-movie irony and meta-references — Galahad tries to explain Eggsy’s journey by asking: “Did you see the film Trading Places? How about Nikita? Pretty Woman?” — that threaten to implode, but Vaughan’s pace makes them bearable.

It left me a bit flat, though. It’s fun but disposable.

There’s nothing worse than chiding a film for what it should have been, but in this instance it’s justified.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (MA15+, Fox, 123min, $29.99) displays the wrong kind of creativity. It is slick but not very smart.

Twitter: @michaelbodey

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Jedda (PG)
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Orange is the New Black, seasons one-two (M15+)

Roadshow (1151min, $59.99)

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Lucky Them (M)
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