Kingsman: Shoot the Dog, because Reasons

I fucking love Kingsman: The Secret Service.

It’s one of those movies that is a true nonstop thrill ride from start to finish. The visual flair of the action is stunning. The characters are immediately striking and they always give you the sense that there’s something more going on behind the scenes. Colin Firth and Samuel L Jackson give iconic performances, they control any scene that they’re in and scenes with both of them together are positively chilling. It’s a pastiche of modern spy movies, it’s cheesy and over the top, and it knows exactly what it is. The church brawl is among the most insane and high octane moments in all of film (never forget what the original context was). It was truly one of the best movies to come out in the past decade.

…But there is one aspect of it that really bothers me.

One of this movie’s greatest strengths is also its greatest weakness. The characters are all great, but they’re all rather static, more or less the same from their first scene to their last. This isn’t too bad for the most part, all of them serve the purpose that they need to. Where this gets to be a problem is when it comes to characters that are actually supposed to have development over the course of the plot. No one embodies this more than who is supposed to be the story’s main protagonist, Gary “Eggsy” Unwin, who is very specifically supposed to be going through an arc as he goes from being a hoodlum on the streets of England to a top-tier spy.

The nature of this arc is rather muddied. Galahad/Harry recognizes that Eggsy has talent, drive, and a strong moral core, but he chides him for giving up on his aspirations and settling for being a mere thug. About halfway through the movie he tells Eggsy that being a “gentleman” has nothing to do with the status of one’s birth but being comfortable with oneself. This, you would think, is supposed to be the core moral of the movie. Eggsy has everything that he needs to be an upstanding and capable individual, he simply needs to look inside himself for the will to do good. Harry seemingly has been making an effort to reach out to more “unlikely” candidates like this in the past, judging from the way Arthur speaks about Lancelot.

Then we get to Eggsy’s final test for Kingsman. He and his dog J.B. come into Arthur’s study. Arthur hands him a gun.

“Shoot the dog,” he says.

This doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere. We see early in the movie that Eggsy is unwilling to run over a cat even if it means getting caught by the police. We also see that he sacrifices himself so that his friends can get away. For all his tough talk, Eggsy is not the kind of person who wants to see harm brought to others, not even if it would be advantageous to him.

So Eggsy fails to shoot J.B. (or Arthur) and is kicked out. It is then revealed that the gun was loaded with a blank so there was no danger. A Kingsman never endangers innocent lives, Harry tells Eggsy.

There are two problems with this.

The first is quite simply that this has nothing to do with Eggsy’s character growth. Eggsy having to be comfortable with the idea of killing someone innocent, someone he might be close to, doesn’t have anything to do with him learning to be a better person.

And even if it was more relevant, even if Eggsy’s arc did revolve around needing to make hard decisions like this, the movie does a shit job of showing that this is the way the Kingsman organization operates. If anything, before this point it goes out of its way to show that Kingsman doesn’t give a shit about the lives of innocents. The new recruits are immediately given the warning that if they break their confidentiality regarding their line of work, both they and their next of kin will be killed. Their first test sees one of them drowning, and we are only told later that this person was actually a plant. There was seemingly a halfhearted attempt to backpedal from this after the parachute test when it’s revealed that they actually all had parachutes after all, but if anything that doesn’t really make it any better. They won’t kill anyone during a test, but they will fuck with them? What would have happened if the last one, the presumed “gimp,” didn’t think to try pulling their cord? If they really cared about people not dying, Merlin would’ve had it set up to remotely deploy everyone’s parachutes once they passed the safety threshold.

And then, after all that, there is no resolution to this. Harry says that he will sort things out when he gets back, but, well, he doesn’t get back. Eggsy then resolves that something needs to be done and comes back to Arthur only to stumble into the discovery that he’s defected to Valentine and Eggsy needs to take matters into his own hands. The character arc is just completely forgotten and we ultimately see Eggsy fully settled into the life of a Kingsman at the end of the movie. We don’t even see J.B. again.

This also ends up with there being very little commentary on the almost hypocritical classism that pervades the Kingsman organization but that’s a topic for another ramble.

It’s really frustrating seeing what is otherwise a fantastic movie be weighed down by such a tremendous flaw.

It’s even more frustrating knowing that it was already done better.

You might not be aware that Kingsman: The Secret Service was originally a comic. Unfortunately, I don’t know how much I can recommend it because it is done something of a disservice by having the movie to compare it to. No amount of gory action is going to seem the same without the added flair that comes from having motion and sound. There is actually very little similarity between the two works outside the broad strokes, with the only directly lifted characters being Eggsy and his immediate family. Harry Hart, for example, is replaced with Jack London, Eggsy’s uncle who frequently has to bail him out of the trouble he gets himself into (and also apparently is just…publicly known to be some kind of big government official?). The Kingsman agents don’t even have the Knights of the Round Table naming scheme. I’m also really not a big fan of the way Eggsy looks, he has a buzz cut and spends a lot of time looking far more like a middle-aged man than a college dropout. I think that a lot of it just doesn’t offer the same sense of thrill that you would get from the movie.

But the one way in which the comic really succeeded was in what was supposed to be its central content, the arc of Eggsy coming into his own. Eggsy is shown to struggle here, he faces relapses when he is made to doubt that he’s doing any good by being a part of Kingsman, and it really calls into focus the fact that he is having to go against his roots. One of his tests has him going undercover to take out a gang, only for him to get there and they recognize him, forcing Eggsy to kill people he was probably once friends with. During an undercover operation, Eggsy overhears some of the trainees talking about how much they doubt him because of his upbringing, prompting him to ditch the operation and then steal Jack’s spymobile for a joyride. At his lowest point, Eggsy has to learn to pull himself out of the ditch he’s dug himself into and own who he is.

What’s even better, though, is that all of this continues into the sequel comic, Kingsman: The Red Diamond. Even though Eggsy has worked hard as a spy, he still faces difficulty with the aristocratic elite in the form of Prince Philip being ungrateful to him during a rescue mission, leading to an altercation that ends up with him forcibly put on leave of absence. We learn that, despite becoming fabulously rich between Eggsy’s new job and inheriting a portion of uncle Jack’s fortune, Eggsy’s mother has fallen in with another shitty boyfriend and is still living in an apartment. He has to bring his little brother to Kingsman’s base of operations to get treatment for a basic condition because he doesn’t know how to handle life at home. In the end, Eggsy settles down not with the fame and accolades that would be given to him for saving the world but simply returns to his home neighborhood with his family. Not to mention that the whole plot is about contending with the rich and power-hungry who would doom the world because they believe that the commonfolk have not “earned” their money.

And it’s certainly a far, far better sequel than the sequel that the movie ended up getting, but that’s a topic for another ramble.

I love Eggsy, I really do. He’s a good boy. Taron Egerton presents a very likeable performance. The concept of a kid being raised up from the street to the position of an elite agent is very engaging and I can understand how that got picked up to have a story built around it (I’m also really glad that the comic didn’t end up getting picked as a Marvel property as the original pitch was going to be). I just wish that there had been more done to actually show and follow through with his development in the movie.