Spy games

Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service is adapted from a comic-book series (The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons), and at times that’s a little too evident. But it’s also a comical action film, with secret agents, high-tech weaponry, and international espionage, as well as intermittent jolts of crazed satire and broad spoofs of several sorts.

It’s a mostly entertaining stew of movie ingredients, but erratic in ways that dilute and dull down the whole enterprise. While the spoofing of James Bond films is mostly affectionate and inconsequential, the parts of the story involving spy agencies, Internet moguls, global conspiracies, and semi-futuristic technology are a rather unstable mix of sci-fi extravagance, furious satire and fanboy jokiness.

Colin Firth, who plays a foppish variation on the Bond-type super spy, acquits himself nicely in the dialog scenes but is pretty clearly out of his element in the movie’s blindingly souped-up fight scenes. Samuel L. Jackson is sharp and stingingly funny as the wide-eyed, lisping Internet mogul who sees satellite-assisted massacres as the solution to the problem of global warming.

Taron Egerton is mostly likable as Gary “Eggsy” Unwin, the fledgling secret agent whom the veteran Harry Hart (Firth) hopes to bring to the special “Kingsman” branch of the British secret services. Gazelle, who has lethal blades where her feet ought to be, and Roxy, also a Kingsman inductee, are ably played by Sofia Boutella and Sophie Cookson, respectively.