Kingsman: The Secret Service is an action movie about a secret British organization, so hidden that no government is aware of its existence. Funded by the English aristocracy, they affect change in the world and choose to remain discreet about it. The Kingsmen all have code names based on the names of the Knights of the Round Table. Manners, etiquette, and honor are the behaviors that all of them must follow.

The movie starts with a kidnapping. Professor Arnold (Mark Hamill) is kidnapped and is held for a meeting. Before that can happen, one of the Kingsmen starts to rescue him, but is foiled. The organization has to find a replacement for their fallen comrade.

Kingsman primarily focuses on Eggsy, a twenty-something that has had a rough and tumble existence. Unbeknownst to him, his father was a Kingsman who was killed in the line of duty. Galahad (Colin Firth) has kept an eye on him, and when Eggsy gets into trouble with the police, Galahad offers him the opportunity to enter the trials to become a Kingsman. The training is difficult and brutal. Only one Kingsman will be chosen from all the candidates.

Meanwhile, celebrities and heads of state are disappearing, and no one knows why, or who’s doing it. Galahad investigates, and the path leads to an enigmatic tech billionaire, Valentine (Samuel L Jackson), who has made it his life’s goal to solve the problem of Global Warming. He has a plan, but the details of it are unclear.

This is, essentially, a spy film, complete with all the requisite action movie tropes. However, it’s done with a certain style and flair that harkens back to the old Avengers TV series, with John Steed, Emma Peel, et al. The Kingsman organization emulates what I expect The Avengers’ organization was. If you’ve never seen that show, you should, and you’ll understand.

Kingsman was unfolding as you’d expect, and it was a typical movie of the genre. They even make several references to James Bond movies, and how they play out. At the very least, they weren’t trying to claim to be original in any way, shape, or form. However, that changed, once Galahad visits a church much like the Westboro Baptist. What he says, and what happens in that scene was as pretty entertaining, if not better, than almost anything Quentin Tarantino has ever done. It has a quite a ‘bit of the old ultraviolence’ that is Q’s trademark, but it was extremely well choreographed, and amusing in its own way.

That said, the rest of the film plays out in a more traditional manner that one would expect from such movies. That scene I’ve mentioned does elevate this from out of the pack of many such parodies and ripoffs, enough to make me recommend it. The very end of the movie is a bit more crude than I’d have expected, given what the Kingsmen supposedly stand for. However, in the movie itself, there’s a discussion about the old guard not being to embrace future generations and their ways, so in that respect, I guess I can almost forgive it. Almost. This is not necessarily a movie you need to see in a theater. You can wait to stream it later, if there’s nothing else on screens that you wish to see.