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Born in Hong Kong, Jason is a globe-trotter who spent his entire adult life in Europe, the United States and Canada before settling back in his birthplace to rediscover his roots.
British director Matthew Vaughn is the man behind two of 20th Century Fox’s most successful franchises: Kick-ass and X-Men. His latest offering, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is closer to the former than the latter. Like Kick-ass, Kingsman is based on a Mark Millar comic and a self-referencing parody of its genre – in this case, British spy films. The movie also takes itself far less seriously than the two X-Men prequels. In fact, just when one scene is about to get too heavy or convoluted, the camera conveniently cuts to the next. The result is a collage of slick camera works and clever one-liners, stitched together by an implausible and predictable plot.
There is no shortage of silliness in the movie. There is the church massacre set piece – an orgy of hacked limbs and pulverised heads – that goes on for far too long. The scene is a cross between Zombieland and M. Night Shyamalan’s bad thriller The Happening. Then there is a drawn-out sequence that involves human heads going off like the Fourth of July fireworks while Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March blasts in the background. Depending on your penchant for gratuitous gore, you may find these follies part of the movie’s charm. Or not.
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