So Monday morning after I had – mostly – recovered from the weekend writers conference, my sweetie-wife and I attended a matinee showing of the new Colin Firth film, Kingsman: The Secret Service.

The premise of this romp is that after the Great War (WW I for those not historically inclined) a group of British aristocrats formed an independent secret service to keep the peace and protect the world. (hmm I think history has already pronounced that they failed, but this film is far too light in tone to address such matters.) The members all have code-name taken from England’s greatest myth, yeah that Arthurian one they nicked from the French. Anyway Galahad –Firth- after botching a mission and costing the life of a teammate many years later recruits the dead man’s son into the service.

This introduces the first of many logical inconsistencies in the story. Our hero is lower class, a punk, but if all the Kingsmen are from the highest levels of British society how did this come about? Never mind, skip over it.

So there’s two plots going on. One is the kid going into training and competition for the single slot open in the organization. The second is Galahad casing down leads into mysterious kidnappings where the victims remain free and more Kingsmen have been killed.

Samuel L Jackson, adding an unusual lisp to his voice, plays the Jeff Bezos-like maniacal villain, bent on a world killing and world saving plan. (In a bit you can think he’s like Hugo Drax from Moonraker.) Naturally the mentor is removed from the story and the kid has to step up and prove his worth.

This film has serious tonal issues, light and funny one moment, too serious the next, and it can’t make up its mind if it going to be graphic or silly. The ending has a quite problematic issue with sexual blackmail of a kidnap victim by the hero. It’s across the line and in direct violation to the ‘gentleman’ spy tone for the rest of the heroes.

I would not waste money on a theatrical screening, but some might enjoy it when it eventually becomes available for streaming.