Kingsman: The Secret Service is the spy action/comedy by Mathew Vaughn, the director of Layer Cake, Kick Ass, and X-Men: First Class. Up front, I love Vaughn as a director – he really gets what makes action scenes work, how they can be propulsive and frenetic while still being comprehensible… his action drives the story and the characters and are not just something visual to please the audience. Is Kingsman up to his level of greatness?

Well, yes and no. It’s overall a good movie but not a great movie. The first half is ok… it’s fine… it’s a recruiting storyline where the Kinsgman secret agents bring in a lower class British kid into their world of suave gentlemen spies and it’s fine for an origin story. This is intercut with the villains making plans and doing evil stuff – and then the second half kicks in and the movie kind of goes nuts both with killer action stuff but also a level of insanity that may turn some people off (more on this later).

The movie is a self-aware spy flick which has nostalgia for classic James Bond movies… and I’m talking classic Roger Moore Bond movies. The villain (played a lisping tech billionaire Samuel L. Jackson) reminisces about the good old days where spy movies were fun and funny, not just dark and grim like they are these days. So the movie is self-referential (it exists in a world where James Bond is a movie) and both avoids and accepts a lot of the British-style dapper gentlemen spy cliches. I’d accuse it of having its cake and eat it too but I think it would agree with me.

From a pure propulsive action stand-point, it’s some of the best stuff I’ve seen using actors who we wouldn’t usually think of as action stars. Colin Firth does amazing and convincing work and if it’s not him pulling off the action, then it’s amazing FX and stunt work. This movie not only films action well and lucidly (while still being chaotic), but it puts together a number of inter-cut scenes that, when edited together smartly, creates a great cycle of tension and release.

Now, this movie is based on a comic book by Mark Millar who also wrote Kick-Ass and is directed by (as I mentioned) the same guy who did the Kick-Ass movie. There’s a scene in Kingsman set in a church in “Kentucky, USA” that looks at that scene in Kick-Ass where Hit-Girl slaughters a room full of criminals and smirks knowingly before one-upping it by about 1000%. The level of sheer audacious carnage in this scene is pretty remarkable and intense… the camera shys from nothing. If you saw John Wick with Keanu Reeves, it’s that with axes, guns, knives, and every sharp instrument you can find in a room full of (rednick racists asshole) civilians. A reviewer pointed out the level of carnage is so great that he felt sorry for the rednick racist assholes and that’s saying something.

My point is… fair warning. This is an R rated action flick for a reason… there’s also more exploding heads than you might imagine… and the movie continues its audacity by who gets their heads exploded and why. There’s an anarchistic bent to the film that’s quite interesting. Or, possibly, it’s not anarchistic so much as anti-American… the movie is intensely British and really doesn’t think highly of America without outright saying it in so many words. But it does, for example, place the exemplar of British suave gentlemanliness (Colin Firth) up against the crude f-bomb dropping American villain (Sam Jackson) who wants to serve McDonalds hamburgers in what’s either an interesting attack on American culture, extreme product placement, or both.

Anyhow, that’s enough words. I think this is a good, solid movie that has problematic aspects that will turn some folks off and others will find cheeky fun. It’s not as good as Kick-Ass or X-Men: First Class but it eventually reaches their levels in the second half. And in that first half… it trades in cliches and isn’t terribly surprising but it’s still good fun.

Score: 84