Director: Matthew Vaughn. Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Caine, Mark Hamill, Soufia Boutella, Mark Strong, Jack Davenport. 15 cert, 129 min.  Matthew Vaughn has carved out a commercially viable niche in slick, hyper-violent, pungently meta comic-book fantasias. He gave us Kick-Ass, a riff on superhero lore many adored for its snarky attitude and sweary preteen assassin, Hit Girl. I say many. For those weary few of us who harbour an allergy to Vaughn’s deliberately obnoxious style, each movie feels like an insult – one added to a heap of computer-generated injuries. The more calculated Vaughn’s films are to appeal to his surprisingly rabid fan-base, the more they seem custom-built to repel everyone else.  In his espionage caper Kingsman: The Secret Service, Vaughn does for James Bond what Kick-Ass more or less did for Spider-Man. A kind verdict would call his upending of the secret-agent genre uproariously playful. But it’s nasty play, like a brutish sibling forcing rotten fruit down your throat.  Amid its imitation Ken Adam sets, digital carnage and Savile Row tailoring, one scene of unintentionally potent nostalgia sticks out. It’s when the two main antagonists, Colin Firth’s super-spook Harry Hart and Samuel L. Jackson’s baddie, Valentine, sit down to compare their love of the old Bond movies. There was a certainty to them, a style, and an endearing silliness, which Vaughn’s film argues have gone out of fashion. Unfortunately, attempting to don these borrowed threads doesn’t suit it in the slightest. Partly, it’s not sincere enough. But it’s also much more cannily marketed than it has been made. Confidently cast with the right British faces (Michael Caine, Mark Strong, Jack Davenport), it may look like fun, but manages to expend every ounce of goodwill by the end.  The logic of Firth in the part of a debonair spy is unimpeachable – he’s part Bond, part George Falconer from A Single Man, part Patrick Macnee from The Avengers. Unfortunately, the role’s such a bespoke no-brainer there’s no friction in watching this particular star play it. What’s dismaying about Firth’s function here is the sense we’re being peddled a brand and getting no extra value.  Like Kick-Ass, also derived from a Mark Millar comic, and like Vaughn’s 2011 X-Men picture, First Class, Kingsman quickly becomes a recruitment movie, which lets it fall back on even more tried-and-tested formulae. Her Majesty’s secret service are a man down, and the smart money is on Eggsy (Taron Egerton, who gets marks for effort), a council-estate wide boy and unusually polite Millwall fan, to outfox the handful of braying Oxbridge toffs who think they’ve got the gig sewn up.  Their trial by boot camp is the one section of the film that moves at a tolerable clip, even if the script’s resorting to utterly moth-eaten clichés about silver spoons and ivory towers. The gist seems to be that, these days, even a working-class lad can dream big and become a slick, womanising male chauvinist dinosaur if he sets his heart on it.  “They were only ever as good as their villain,” ventures Firth about the vintage Bonds, which drives this film straight into a ditch, since it’s left looking as fakely dreadful as Jackson’s Valentine, a baseball-cap-wearing tech billionaire. The actor’s lisping delivery is a big joke at the expense of his old foe Spike Lee, but not a good one. He has a henchwoman with razor-sharp prosthetic feet, allowing Vaughn to indulge the kind of effects coup he has made his grisly trademark: she dances around unsuspecting foes and turns them into tossed salad.  Flourishes like this ensure that Kingsman will play to the intended fan-base, which is all well and good. But it’s more than just a state-of-the-art nuisance. One bewilderingly random set piece illustrates everything about it that’s noxious: undoubtedly, it’ll be the Vaughn brigade’s favourite part. In it, the primly murderous Firth slices, gouges and shoots his way through an entire American church congregation of fire-and-brimstone bigots. Is this meant to be glorious catharsis? Hilarious comeuppance? Wild fun? Is it OK to tick none of the above?
Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn's hyper-violent James Bond pastiche, starring   Colin Firth and Samuel L Jackson, is a slick, sick joke, says Tim Robey