The brilliant first Kick Ass reminded that one fanboy's superhero was another's hyper-violent vigilante.
Just as Vaughn brought back kapow silliness to a screen superhero era dominated by the grim Dark Knight, Kingsman reminds you that as earnest and gripping the Daniel Craig Bond era has been, it's not really been a lot of laughs.
K:TSS is a lot of laughs, even if it delivers moments where you're really not sure whether you should be chuckling. A massacre inside a southern US church soundtracked by redneck rock anthem Free Bird turns the comedy deeply black and disturbing.
That it's Colin Firth at the centre of the mayhem -- has he ever thrown a punch in a movie before, apart from thumping Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones' Diary? -- is amusing in itself.
Sending up his own good chap image, Firth is terrific fun as Harry Hart.
Hart is a Kingsman -- a member of a well-resourced independent espionage agency fighting to keep the world a decent place, and if possible, a better-dressed one, too. Their history is some mumbo jumbo about having sprung from the tailors of London's Savile Row, who had witnessed the slow collapse of the old world order through their decreasing royal clientele.
In the movie's preamble, Hart loses a fellow Kingsman on an operation, so feels obliged to this comrade's young son.
Years later, when teenage Eggsy (likeable newcomer Taron Egerton), has turned into a hoodie-wearing tearaway and finds himself down the nick, he calls up his mysterious fairy godfather. He's soon away to Kingsman training school, a working class underachiever in a class of over-achieving toffs.
The film does stall a little in these early stages, with its repeated tests of the recruits' killer instincts and their class tensions, overseen by Kingsman boss Michael Caine.
If that all sounds like it's all sprung from the pages of a comic book, well sort of. Except the comic, the Bond-inspired The Secret Service written by Mark Millar who also created Kick Ass didn't have the bespoke stuff and stiff upper lip.
It did have a bit of family Bond-ing with an uncle recruiting his nephew into MI6. It also had a story about real celebrities being abducted -- including Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill and a villain, a tech magnate who has figured out a way to control people by hacking their cellphones.
The film features Hamill, but he's cast as a Professor James Arnold, the name of the evil guy in the comic.
The actual villain of the piece here is Richmond Valentine, played with a lisping by Samuel L. Jackson. His character is one part Steve Jobs to several parts Flavor Flav. He's a 21st century Blofeld with an evil plan to get rid of everyone except the rich, famous and beautiful in an effort to save the planet.
There's a pop culture loop being closed here -- when Millar was writing The Ultimates -- The Avengers storyline which effectively became the superhero films -- he based his Nick Fury on Jackson who then played him in almost every Marvel film since.
Talking of The Avengers, Kingsman seems influenced by the classic great British spy TV series of that name. Maybe it's in his creative use of a brolly, but Firth's Harry Hart reminds more of Patrick Macnee's John Steed than a Sean Connery or Roger Moore-era Bond.
The closest this gets to Steed's sexy partner Emma Peel, though, isn't Eggsy's young colleague Roxy (Sophie Cookson) but Gazelle, Valentine's henchwoman with her blade runner legs.
Vaughn's affection for ye olde superspy stuff shines through all this and is infectious. He was born to it, in a way. That surname of his came from the man he long thought to be his father, Robert Vaughn, the star of 60s series The Man from U.N.C.L.E before it was proved otherwise.
His previous directing effort, X-Men: First Class, did some very old Bond moments in its 1960s prequel setting too. Maybe they just need to give Vaughn the real Bond franchise once Craig and Sam Mendes have done their dash.
But until the new Bondflick, Spectre, arrives, Vaughn's madly irreverent spin will do nicely.
Cast: Colin Firth, Samuel L. Jackson Michael Caine, Taron Egerton
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Rating: R16 (violence and offensive language) Running time: 129 mins
Verdict: Classy but crude Bond-ish action comedy
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