Kingsmen, the circus, and Freebird

The circus is in town! Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey to be precise, here until Sunday, it's alright but the elephants depress me.

I didn't want to write about that though, I wanna talk about a movie, I had Freebird stuck in my head today, as often happens, and it reminded me of the best scene in the best movie about spies so far this summer.

I speak of course about Kingsmen: The Secret Service, but you knew that already from the big ole' picture.

In brief, the movie is about Colin Firth training a new member of an ultrasecret spy organization called the Kingsmen, and their attempts to spoil Samuel L. Jackson's plan to take over the world.

At one point Firth goes to one of those horrible evangelical fringe churches, basically a Westborough Baptist Church stand-in, and becomes the victim of evil mind control technology, what results is a fight scene set to the guitar solo portion of Freebird as everyone in the building turns on each other.

It's very gripping, visceral(No actual viscera), really well shot, and quite hard to watch, only possible because they take the effort to set these folks up as not very nice people, mind you, not bad enough that they deserve to be killed brutally, but bad enough that you feel a little satisfaction, then feel bad about it.

Spy movies have traditionally had pretty high stakes in them, fate of the world an so on, and there is often a number of action scenes and villainous atrocities that cause a rather large amount of civilian damage, these are rarely mentioned after the fact, in some movies they are not even addressed (Looking at you Fast and Furious franchise). Kingsmen does the same thing, but somehow the scenes are shot in such a way as you the viewer doesn't forget about it, it feels like really the sort of glee the film takes in showing the collateral damage works kind of as a send up of the trope in the first place. I left with the impression that we weren't necessarily watching the good guys win, rather maybe the less bad guys.

I could be wrong about those intentions of course, but that is what I read into it, if you don't want to analyze subtext or anything then Kingsmen is still a fun, stupid, but not insultingly so, slick movie and a good way to spend an afternoon. Also, Freebird kicks ass, all nine minutes of it, I don't care what anyone says.