Fun
Frisky
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Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Kingsman: The Secret Service — the 2015 movie that featured Colin Firth and Taron Egerton as mentor and trainee in a secret British spy organization that relied heavily on bespoke suits and over-the-top violence — was a reasonably divisive movie. It was no mother!, but it definitely had its partisans and its detractors. Director Matthew Vaughn had to be used to that, since the last time he created a world where heroes who were very concerned about their clothes engaged in ultra-violence, it was 2010’s also-divisive Kick-Ass. But while the cartoonish violence, overly slick packaging, and the decision to have Samuel L. Jackson play the villain character like a riff on Russell Simmons are the elements most often cited by Kingsman detractors, there is one moment that draws the hottest ire: the stupid, nonsensical, probably-offensive-but-that’s-not-even-the-point scene at the very end where Eggsy (our newly minted hero, played by Egerton) has sex up the bum with the Swedish princess, who had promised said bum to him as his reward for saving the day.
Here. Look.
It’s crass. It’s stupid. It makes the hero look like a womanizing dickwad when up until this point he was a rough-around-the-edges decent bloke. And it makes a mockery of any other well-drawn female characters in the rest of the movie, because in the end, women are there for fucking. And in the least comfortable manner possible!
Isolated from the rest of the movie, the scene almost works, because Egerton is just that charming. But coming at the tail end (no pun intended) of a movie that bludgeoned its audience with violence that it tried to pass off as artful but which was honestly just excessive, the cheekiness (again, no pun intended, honestly) of the moment comes across as swaggering rather than subversive. What’s allegedly being subverted in this moment is the James Bondian womanizing that runs through all those British secret-agent type movies. The suave hero taking the virginal princess as his just reward. Making it anal sex is supposed to up the absurdity of the moment enough to make it satire. A commentary on the shit we used to let heroes get away with.
Matthew Vaughn’s problem — and it was his problem in Kick-Ass as well — is that he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to get credit for subverting the violent and patriarchal tropes of action movies like this, but he also wants to roll around in it, and he especially wants his audiences to have fun with it. The violence in Kingsman is supposed to be outrageous, but not repulsive. The butt-sex joke is supposed to make us blush, but we’re still meant to find Eggsy charming. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having a sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, arriving in theaters this Friday.
The satire/not satire line is a fine one, and since it often coincides with the often-tired argument over whether filmmakers endorse bad behavior when they depict it, it’s not a line people relish discussing. To this particular eye, Martin Scorsese had similar cake-and-eat-it-too problems with The Wolf of Wall Street, where he wanted to show Jordan Belfort horrible behavior as a way of indicting him while also allowing his audience to revel in as much of that bad behavior as they could. Matthew Vaughn, for as talented a filmmaker as he is, is no Martin Scorsese. And from the sounds of this interview with Deadline, he doesn’t seem to feel anything but pleased with himself for getting the butt sex joke into the film, as he recounts his presenting the idea to Fox exec Emma Watts:
I remember Emma just looks at me like I am a deranged child that loves to press the studio executives’ buttons. So, therefore, to get a reaction out of her, I have to think long and hard which button to press. The rest of the studio folks there just about fell off their chairs, and they all looked at Emma to try and figure it out. To be blunt, when I showed them the first cut, I had an even more graphic moment, which I knew would never make it. I wasn’t even going to fight for it. It was just to try and get Emma wound up. To Emma’s credit, she knew my game, because it was as pornographic as can be, this shot, and it didn’t bother her. Emma is a force of nature, and battle-hardened. She has gone through so much, I think, being at Fox for a long time now. I don’t think anything fazes her anymore. She’s a much calmer, calmer executive to when we first met, but then again, I’m probably a calmer director as well.
Is it equally dumb to care about a dumb butt-sex joke in a movie I didn’t even like to begin with? Probably! Can I even say the joke ruins Kingsman: The Secret Service when there’s not much to be ruined in the first place? Doubt it! But it deserves to be repeated into this whole dumb series of movies is dead in the ground: that’s a bad, stupid joke.
