Vaughn: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

While the most recent Bond films have added a lot to the franchise – depth, angst, backstory – they’ve taken a lot away as well. Lost in Daniel Craig’s clenched jaw and existential snarl, you could be forgiven for forgetting that this was once a fundamentally comic, camp series, and that Bond was more or less a sexual deviant, questionable at best when it came to his encounters with women. In some ways, Kingsman steps in to fill that niche, whittling Bond down to the camp extravagance that made him so popular in the first place, and unfolding an alternative myth of origins to Skyfall – the story of how a Chav, Gary “Eggsy” Unwin (Taron Egerton), learned to disguise himself as a gentleman, under the tutleage of Harry “Galahad” Hart (Colin Firth), a senior member of an aristocratic secret service known as the Kingsmen. One of the major casualties of the most recent Bond films has been Q, who’s too archaic for a world driven by digital crime, and too irreverent for Craig’s stony dramatics, but Kingsmen, by contrast, is a bit like watching Bond from Q’s perspective, as Galahad instructs Eggsy on all the accessories he needs to become a gentleman, leading him through a seemingly endless array of coats, canes, shoes and other accoutrements, all of which are armed with the latest innovations in micro-defence. It may all revolve around a global terror plot, hatched by a crazed spokesman for climate change, played by Samuel L. Jackson in a brilliant parody of the typical Bond villain, but at the end of the day it feels as if nothing is quite as significant as finding the right suit for the right occasion, especially the right sexual occasion. In that sense, it nails the fine line between aristocratic elegance and tabloid sensationalism that makes Bond such a quintessence of British snobbery, not least because it’s absurdly violent and sexually explicit at the same time, ending with a scene that’s worthy of They Live, and often recalling Monty Python in the way it skewers the British class system from the inside. Based on a graphic novel by David Gibbons and Mark Millar that was released at the same time as Skyfall – the apex of arthouse Bond – it’s not exactly nostalgic so much as simply continuing the Bond tradition as the lowbrow, B-movie romp it always really was, pitching Firth as the next Bond – or, rather, as the best of all possible bridges between old-school and neo-Bonds.