Thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot details we can’t reveal in our review.
Kingsman: The Secret Service ends with newly minted Kingsman agent Eggsy having anal sex with a princess after blowing Barack Obama’s head off. That’s kind of an over-simplification; the movie ends with Merlin’s reaction to watching Eggsy have anal sex with a princess, after Eggsy has blown the heads of all of the world’s leaders off, Obama being the only real-life figure involved. (The villainous prime minister of Sweden—that hotbed of socialist snobbery—gets the slow-motion treatment, his eyeballs launching like escape pods while his head erupts in a burst of blue smoke.) And, to be perfectly fair, it’s the princess’ idea—an offer in exchange for saving the world, which involves killing all of its leaders, who are in on Richmond Valentine’s plan to cull the world’s population using mind-altering cellphone signals and have, unwittingly, had self-destruct devices implanted into their necks. It’s complicated.
On the one hand, it’s pretty clearly an over-the-top homage to spy-movie logic; women are rewards and spies are the only people fit to run the world. (The movie hedges its bets on the former by making female Kingsman candidate Roxy emphatically not a love interest.) But, parody or not, this conclusion fits pretty neatly with the movie’s politics, which repeatedly posit that all governments are bad. That might seem anarchic (the long exploding heads sequence includes a set that intentionally brings to mind Dr. Stangelove’s War Room), were it for the fact that Kingsman has already gone to great lengths to establish its genteel “independent agents”—a kind of shadow aristocracy, protected by wealth, who inherit the names of Arthurian knights as their titles—as moral superiors who only falter when they succumb to the lure of governmental authority. When the smoke and brain matter settle, they’ll be the only ones left with power. Who will defend the masses, who can be turned into zombie killers with the promise of free phones? It sure plays like a defense of patrician power—but, then, it’s just a silly little movie…