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“Oxfords, not Brogues.”

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015) has all the sophisticated gentlemen and pompous novelty of a James Bond film, with none of the subtlety. There’s enough melee combat and gun shooting to square off against Jason Bourne, but with less conviction. But while James Bond and his brethren revel in the utility of their service, the men of Kingsman live by a code of manners that, despite the atrocious obviousness of their engagements with criminals, shutters their actions in the background of public perception.

Certainly, the agents in the film are well-aware of the genre titles they’re spoofing, evidenced endlessly from long-winded conversations about the trivial tropes of classic spy films, the existence of stupidly-complicated and deadly gadget weapons, and frequently referencing genre cliches and mocking classic spy dialogue (occasionally to questionable success: see the film’s controversial ending sequence, quite NSFW). One of the film’s featured players, Eggsy (Taron Egington) celebrates his newfound Bond-ness by cheekily requesting a preposterous martini (“Gin, not vodka. Obviously. Stirred for 10 seconds while glancing at an unopened bottle of vermouth.”) And then there’s Harry Hart’s (Colin Firth) umbrella/gun/shield/HUD straight out of TV’s Avengers (1961) with modern upgrades.

A Kingsman quotes Hemingway, and operates out of a secret base accessed via vacuum tube train below an old tailor shop. It’s all very classic spy stuff, yet all very not.

“While it’s veritably awash in knowing nods to the tropes and iconography of the Bond canon, and could very easily have tipped over into Austin Powers territory, it manages to navigate the narrowest of tonal tightropes while spinning a ripping good yarn in the process.” - Zaki Hasan, Huffington Post

Kingsman pulls the lighthearted, goofy essence of a Bond film and packs it full of multi-colored mushroom clouds and fireworks and uses it to make people’s heads explode. Unlike Bond films, which come across as a product more serious than the sum of its nonsensical parts, Kingsman delivers something even sillier than it actually is. The violence, the innuendos, the snobbery - all those crucial ingredients subdued in classic spy cinema are the components Kingsman plays with at full power.

And what’s more important to a spy movie than its villain? Just as a super spy is only as efficient as his nemesis commands, a spy movie is only as good as its antagonist. Kingsman gives us two: Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), the tech billionaire determined to solve the Earth’s problems by eradicating the human race, and his blade-legged bodyguard Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), the sexiest and scariest female Oscar Pistorius imaginable who can chop a man in half length-wise with one kick. Valentine talks with a lisp, borrows his wardrobe from Russell Simmons, and in a scene directly inspired by Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan) serving Bond (Roger Moore) a cooked goat’s head in Octopussy (1983), pairs expensive wine with McDonald’s food served on a silver platter.

Kingsman is, ultimately, based on a comic book by Mark Millar. Though the story is a loose adaptation, the film never stops remembering its cartoonish roots, nor the material it is drawing on and subverting every chance it gets.