'Kingsman:' If you're into Bond-age, this one's for you

If the kinky bondage of "50 Shades" is not your thing, the kinky Bond-age of "Kingsman: The Secret Service" may be more to your liking.

The movie is a crazy, cartoony tribute to James Bond movies of the 1970s, when the franchise was handed to Roger Moore, star of "The Spy Who Loved Me" and who himself was The Spy Who Had Love Handles.

They weren't my favorite Bond films, but they were beloved by "Kingsman" director Matthew Vaughn, who apparently worshipped their cheesy effects, outlandish plots and metal-mouthed villains — rest in peace, Richard Kiel.

To Vaughn's way of thinking, the current Daniel Craig incarnation is a scowling Reformation Bond, grumpy and homicidal, and stuck in dull reality.

A proper British spy, says "Kingsman," shouldn't have a tormented soul. He should have an umbrella that opens into a bulletproof shield and fires its own bullets.

Having seen the one deployed in "Kingsman," I quite agree.

Posh Colin Firth wields it to clean out a bar full of hooligans. Firth is Mr. Hart, and his bar fight is a means of recruiting a rough-around-the-edges East Ender named Eggsy (Taron Egerton) for a spy-ish organization known as The Kingsmen.

The Kingsmen are not the king's men — they do not serve the British monarchy, or indeed any individual country. Though quintessentially British, they are a modern, well-equipped, well-trained group of transnational knights who believe in small nobility.

Eggsy learns these and other lessons at the Kingsmen training school (run by Michael Caine), where he's up against upper-class snobs, whom he outwits with street smarts and gumption. All this is good fun.

At the same time, Eggsy learns the value of a bespoke suit: clothes don't make the man so much as announce he's matured.

How perfect, then, that the movie's villain is a U.S. tech titan who, in tech-titan fashion, still dresses like he's in ninth grade. He's Valentine, played by a lisping Samuel L. Jackson with just the right note of Silicon Valley arrogance.

In the Bond tradition, Valentine has a diabolical plan for humanity, and of course a formidable henchman — here, a henchwoman (Sofia Boutella). She's missing her feet but by no means handicapped. She wears razor-sharp blade-runner appendages, and when she goes kung fu on people, heads roll.

Seriously. Heads roll. And explode, en masse. Bodies are bisected. Vaughn ("Kick-Ass") is the sort of fellow who feels that if he hasn't taken things too far, he hasn't gone far enough. Not everything works. A set-piece built around racist Bible Belters, for instance, seem mostly a reflection of Vaughn's own prejudices.

Still, his mocking of tech magnate megalomania is overdue. Valentine — early adopter of silly wearables and also misanthropic hubris — sports his own version of Google Glass in the movie.

If Google hadn't killed the putz-o-vision spectacles last month, they might have gazed upon "Kingsman" and, in an act that demonstrated the possibilities of AI, died of shame.

Online: ph.ly/Movies