I’m not a big action movie guy. I cannot stand the Fast franchise (or is it the Furious franchise? And I hear they’re going to space soon?). I’m a HUGE comic book guy, and even the Marvel movies are a little too bright and poppy for me. So whenever a new attempted action franchise springs up, my expectations are low, and my desire to see it is even lower.
Then there was Kingsman: The Secret Service. I saw the trailer with the English Tom Hanks (Collin Firth), Samuel L. Jackson, and some British kid, and thought, ‘Eh, another average action movie that I’ll roast a bowl to when it’s out on HBO.’ You know what I mean? Kind of like John Wick — when trailers for that dropped, people were all like ‘f*ck Keanu Reeves’, and now here we are a couple years later, and the John Wick franchise is one of the most enjoyable in Hollywood.
But then reviews started rolling out, one thing lead to the next, and me and my fraternity brothers at Rutgers went down to the school’s theater to see what all the hype was about. Spoiler alert: it was great.
It was perfectly paced, genre-norm eschewing, consistently funny, ironic, unorthodox, action-packed, and most surprisingly, it had characters worth investing in. I know you were bummed when Harry Hart got clipped, and I know you were pumped when you heard he was coming back for the sequel (because he was that great of a character that the franchise couldn’t afford to keep him dead).
Plus, it had this scene, which pound-for-pound, can go toe-to-toe with any action scene from the past decade, whether that be a preposterous chase scene in a Fast movie, or the fantastically brutal reality of The Raid.
Well, it was only a matter of time until this soon to be legendary film moment permeated to the rest of the pop cultural zeitgeist, and the result is Family Guy, of all things, remaking the fight.