We Pause This Discussion for a Rant About Kingsman

Yes, I’m still working on “Hot Toy,” but something’s been BUGGING me.

Kingsman. Have you seen it? If you’re not squeamish about violence (if you liked Hot Fuzz, for example, and you should), it’s a lot of over-the-top fun. I’ve seen it three times and intend to watch it many times more. Love it.

Except for what they do to the good women. Okay, it’s a boy’s club movie, but even so, they really screwed this one up. SPOILERS ABOUND IN THE REST OF THIS POST.

NO, REALLY, MAJOR SPOILERS.

Kingsman is the story of how Eggsy, a working glass tough, competes to become a modern Knight of the Round Table in the elite private spy group called the Kingsmen. There are a series of tasks/tests he must survive and pass because there can be only One (the group replaces each Kingsman after he dies and Jack Davenport bites the dust early on), and he’s competing against upper class snobs and two young women who are very nice (because women are never snobs? I dunno), one of whom bonds with Eggsy as an outsider (she’s upper class, but she’s female, so she’s NOK). Eggsy and Roxy become a good team without any romantic subtext, and that part’s great. It’s what they do to Roxy as a character that makes me want to shoot the people who made this with an umbrella set to “Stun.”

So Roxy’s very smart, she’s empathetic without being motherly, she’s physically fit, brave, quick-thinking, and . . . a whiner. They’re up in an airplane and they have to jump out and she’s done it before, but she panics, and the other candidates jeer as they push past her to jump, but Eggsy is right there egging her on.

Now I get this part. Eggsy’s a tough, but the movie has carefully shown that he’s gentle with his baby sister and protective and loving with his disintegrating mother, so being protective and supportive of Roxy is just his third beat. But having her panic and say, “No, I can’t,” instead of cowgirling up and saying, “Thank you, but I can do this,” is such a weak-female stereotype that it comes across as mini-fridging: Roxy fumbles and cries in service to Eggsy’s characterization. Even while Eggsy’s on the point of death, he’s STILL taking care of Roxy, who’s still panicking (although to be fair, Eggsy is also panicking at that point). They demeaned her to make Eggsy look good, which is a waste because by this point in the movie, the guy could kill his grandmother and we’d still be Team Eggsy, it’s impossible not to root for the cheeky bastard.

So Eggsy and Roxy nail the test together. YAY. And then Eggsy fails the final test which is to shoot his dog. Well, hell yes, Eggsy wouldn’t shoot his dog, he’s Our Guy. From the next room where Roxy is being tested, we hear a gunshot. Roxy won’t jump out of an airplane to be a spy without a pep talk, but she’ll shoot her poodle to get in. I told myself that Roxy was so smart that she knew the gun had to have blanks in it; if nothing else, these people wouldn’t want to get dog blood on their nice clean carpets. (Another thing I hated about that part: Harry, Eggsy’s mentor, keeps telling Harry that Kingsmen are about preserving life, so why give the candidates a Good German test? Wouldn’t NOT shooting the dog be the passing grade? But then you know me and dogs.) But the real reason Roxy has to shoot the dog is that it’s the only test that Eggsy can’t pass. Roxy has to be a dog-killer so that Eggsy can be a dog-protector AND have his crisis moment in the plot where he fails and goes to hell (which in his case is back home). Once more, Roxy’s there to make Eggsy look good.

So now Roxy’s a whiner and dog killer, but she’s also the one who becomes a Kingsman. Roxy WINS. But wait, we’re not done. At the end, after huge plot twists (this really is a terrific movie), it’s up to Roxy, Eggsy, and the wonderful Merlin, the Kingsmen’s version of Q, to save the world. Merlin stays on the plane and does amazing things with the computer until the plane is attacked, at which point he takes on about a dozen bad guys and wins because he’s Merlin. Eggsy goes into the villain’s lair and takes out several hundred bad guys, channeling his mentor, Harry, and James Bond and being as over-the-top cheeky badass as it’s possible on a movie screen while wearing a bespoke suit and carrying an umbrella. And then there’s Roxy who gets sent up alone into space in a HALO suit (because of course it’s going to be up in the air) and basically bleats into her suit microphone so that Eggsy has to give her the old “You can do it!” speech while blowing up bad guys with a cigarette lighter.

Still Roxy takes out a satellite, so what’s the problem?

No antagonist.

All of Roxy’s big scenes are of her fighting her air panic. They’re internal struggles played out in whimpers of fear and–in her HALO suit–loud screams. She never gets to kick ass because you never see her in a real struggle with another person. Hell, she even shoots her dog off screen. Eggsy, Harry, and Merlin have to defeat Bad Guys; Roxy has to Overcome Her Fear of Heights and Realize Her Inner Strength. It’s a terrible thing to do to a character, especially the character who actually becomes the Knight, and they’d never to do it to a male character. You get the feeling that the Kingsmen were being sued for diversity and had to hire a girl. Not a woman, a girl, because that’s what Roxy acts like in her big scenes. This isn’t a failure of the actress, Sophie Cookson; she did her damnedest to make Roxy calm and tough, but the words in the script kneecapped her.

You know who is wonderfully tough and active? Gazelle, the homicidal psychopathic sidekick to the Big Bad. She’s fabulous. Murderous and insane, but fabulous. Eggsy defeats her in the end not by being better than she is but by being more duplicitous. Without the secret poisoned weapon, she’d have had Eggsy’s ass. If you want proof of how much Kleenex Roxy is in the movie, watch the preview below; she gets one quick frame pointing a gun at nobody while Gazelle is there in action in several places. Poor old Roxy wasn’t even interesting enough to make the trailer.

And speaking of ass, let’s not because I’ll start ranting about what they did to the Swedish princess which destroyed her characterization and almost made the whole movie about a stupid, crass joke, which is bad because the rest of the movie is smart and elegant. Stay past the credits for the real ending which is Eggsy going home a new man (Hero’s Journey) and saving his mother and the day.

I should mention that Mark Strong, Michael Caine, and Samuel Jackson do great work here, and then there’s the wonderful Colin Firth, who gets to surpass River Song for Dialogue Most Likely To Start a War, given when Harry gets up to exist a hate-filled church sermon and is stopped by a stern-eyed bigot:

“I’m a Catholic whore currently enjoying congress out of wedlock with my black Jewish boyfriend who works in a military abortion clinic. Hail Satan, and have a nice day, madam.”

Oh, and there’s also Taron Egerton as Eggsy who could be James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Peter Quill rolled into one without breaking a sweat. I watched the movie for Colin Firth, but Egerton stole it right out from under him. It’s a really good movie.

It’s just bad at good women.