“Kingsman: The Secret Service” is the new, old Bond. Yay! We'd all grown tired of the twittier aspects of old Bond: the sclerotic formula, sclerotic Q, ancient M, silly villains, silly lewd female names, mildly lewd one-liners, and the ever-increasing Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan banality.
The removal of twit and anchoring in grit, set off by the Jason Bourne films and the further grit-ification of Bond (compliments of Jack Bauer), was enjoyed by no one more than the reviewer.
And yet, now that the old-school Bond archetype is back, we find we’ve missed it. No one does debonair gentleman spies better than the Brits.
The “Bond” franchise can kill two birds with one stone if the next Bond is Idris Elba; they'll have succeeded in keeping the Daniel Craig grit and reinstating the gentlemanly Sean Connery suave.
And this needs to happen. Why? Because “Kingsman,” should it become a franchise (and it has every indication that it will), is not really resurrected Old Bond.
