Brilliant, twisted, thrilling, funny, pleasantly enjoyable and agreeably entertaining. Matthew Vaughn strikes gold (again). He has a licence to thrill this time. A winner.

Rating: 8/10 (9 February 2015)

We have got eight more months until we see Spectre, which we be Bond's next outing on the silver screen. If there in anything in these eight months that would entertain us while waiting, Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Secret Service is one of the closest to your calling.
Five years ago, we got Kick-Ass, a spoof superhero movie that unleashed a new cinematic language. It was rather one of the most irresistibly entertaining films of the past few years. It's ultra-violent structure and bar-over-topping scale of profanity and humour proved that director Vaughn could be a genius at this stuff. The plot focuses on a teenager who decides to become a superhero. Basically for me, even though it isn't one of my favourite films of all time, the film feels like an instant classic.
Newcomer Taron Egerton plays Gary 'Eggsy' Unwin, a cockney teen from London. Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is a secret agent who works for Kingsman (a secret spy service similar to MI6) on a "Diagon Alley", like London street. He finds 'Eggsy' and recruits him to stop an evil mastermind, Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson). He wants to take over the world with an evil plan (the typical baddie plot, hey?). But before doing so, he needs to complete in a few life-risking tasks with other opponents (sounds familiar to you? Hunger Games? Divergent? Yes, most of the young adult books seem the same these days. Don't you agree?).
Mark Strong and Michael Caine play supporting roles alongside Firth in the service. Even Star Wars' Mark Hamill pops up (as a professor, not a Jedi in case you were wondering...) and clearly and obviously, at 63, looks different to how he looked four decades ago. Let's see how he revisits as Luke again in "The Force Awakens" this December.
The jokes arrive agreeably but not as quickly as I was expecting. The film deals with themes such as dysfunction families and bullying. These are serious issues so some ways it has a more mature nature than Vaughn's previous film (Kick-Ass). Vaughn's tone hasn't changed which is a relief. Even if it takes time to register, it's pretty funny stuff. Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman also throw in Bond references as well which add to the fun.
The lacking of ultra-violence is really the only disappointment. There's an overlong entertaining church fight sequence, and the climax at the finale is overblown (probably one of the biggest key references to Bond throughout the whole film). There's also a noticeably clichéd but really fun pub battle. Other than these, there's not a huge amount of action.
You can't help thinking that it might be a mirror image of Vaughn's previous film as it's done by the same director and writers. But after a while, you get used to the different structure of the film itself.
Could Vaughn be an expert at spy movies? I can't answer this. It's a question only for you to answer. Myself, I consider it to be perhaps the best and most clever spy spoof since the Johnny English films. So my answer would be that he would not entirely be an expert at spy movies but one at these style of spoofs. Having done a superhero spoof in 2010 and a spy spoof in 2015, we'll have to see what handle he'll give us in another five years.