Even a surfeit of blood can't tarnish the fun

Rating: 7/10 (8 March 2015)

Deftly directed by Matthew Vaughn, "Kingsman: The Secret Service" is a nostalgic throwback to those early Bond days of the 1960s, when just about every other comedy coming out of Hollywood was a spy-movie send-up ("Our Man Flint," "In Like Flint," "The Silencers," "Agent for H.A.R.M." etc.).
This latest addition to the genre, based on the comic book "The Secret Service" by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, tells of a spy agency so secret that even other spy agencies don't know it exists. Kingsman is made up of a cadre of highly trained, dapperly dressed "gentlemen" spies who consider themselves to be the descendants - in spirit, if not in flesh-and-blood - of the knights of yore (they've even given each other code names like Lancelot and Galahad). That dapperest of dapper gentlemen Colin Firth plays Harry Hart, aka Galahad, a veteran agent who recruits a directionless youth (Taron Edgerton) from the streets of London - the son of an agent who over a decade earlier saved Hart's life - to train in the art of spying (like in "My Fair Lady," the eager trainee pipes in). Eggsy's first major assignment will be to thwart the dastardly high-tech plot of a crazed gazillionaire, played by a lisping Samuel L. Jackson, who intends to save the planet by eliminating the "virus" (i.e., humanity) that seems bent on destroying it.
The humor in the Jane Goldman/Matthew Vaughn screenplay ranges from brittle and dry to pitch-dark satire, so dark in fact that the movie occasionally threatens to run off the rails into a tonal train wreck. Luckily, however, it always manages to right itself just at the point where we're about to bail out on it. It's true that the violence may probably be a tad too graphic for a movie of this type but the overall spirit of good cheer and unalloyed fun triumphs in the end.