Everyone I know has been seeing this, so I thought I’d add my two cents.

What’s It About? Eggsy, a street punk, is recruited by mysterious gentleman Harry Hart to join a secret English spy agency and help thwart an evil mastermind’s plan to cause a global crisis.

STRAIGHT UP: I really liked it. Stylish, funny, expertly assembled. 8.5/10

What I Liked

Colin Firth as Harry Hart a.k.a. Galahad – Firth is the very image of the English gentleman spy; he pulls it off even better than James Bond could. Watching him blend elegance and refinement with lethality in various scenes is a treat.

Samuel L. Jackson as Richmond Valentine – He hams it up as usual, but this time in a slightly different role as a nerdy, aloof would-be supervillain. For an actor whose performances were beginning to feel routine, it’s a welcome tweak to the formula – and it seems like he was having fun with it.

Fashion – Obviously, Galahad and Eggsy (Taron Egerton) look great in tailored suits, but let it be known that Eggsy’s streetwear game is equally on point. As someone with an interest in fashion, I’d kill for some of those fits.

Satisfying action – In general, fistfights and shootouts in Kingsman are a joy to watch – visceral, impactful, and crisply filmed, employing stop-motion and mild shaky-cam effectively without overusing them. On that note…

FREE BIRD! FREE BIRD! – You’ll see what I mean. One of the best group fight scenes in recent memory.

Gazelle – Valentine’s right-hand woman is an intriguing character who should’ve gotten a bit of backstory.

The soundtrack – Some electic choices for a spy movie in there, but it worked for me.

What I Disliked

Needs more Colin Firth – The necessity of showing Eggsy’s Kingsman training scenes limits the time spent with Firth’s Galahad as the principal character. It felt unfair to introduce such a cool character only to take him away so quickly.

Didn’t quite save the world – As Valentine himself points out, Eggsy’s initial gambit to shut down the evil plan du jour ironically creates several hundred casualties itself. Also, before it’s all over, Valentine does manage to plunge the world into crisis for a few minutes, at least – enough to cause some serious damage. As much as we’re meant to enjoy Eggsy’s eventual triumph, I couldn’t help feeling like he was a day late and a dollar short.

CLOSING THOUGHT: Matthew Vaughn will be on my watch list from now on. In his previous film, the superb X-Men: First Class, he successfully drew upon throwback themes and styles to create a superhero movie that felt fresh, yet also familiar. With Kingsman, he has done the same thing in service of a genre arguably more in need of it – the playful tone of Vaughn’s film serving as a welcome contrast to the increasingly self-serious Bond and Bourne franchises. Certainly, Kingsman exceeded the already-high expectations I had going in for it, and I’ll be curious to see if a sequel comes out of it. There is still room to play with this concept, so I think it would be something worth getting excited about.