For Fans of Kingsman

The Free Will Baptist Church sequence in The Secret Service is the most formally inventive action scene of the 2010s. Shot as a near-unbroken take with a whip-pan score by Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson, it turned hyper-violence into something closer to performance art. The sequence forced every subsequent action film to reckon with what choreography actually means when cameras can follow a body through a crowd without cutting. Its influence is all over John Wick's Continental shootouts and the Atomic Blonde stairwell.

The 2021 prequel repositioned Kingsman from comic romp to something bleaker: a story about how the gentleman ideal calcified in grief and imperial hubris. Set against WWI and actual historical figures handled with obvious dramatic license, it asked what these institutions cost the men who built them. It is messier than the first film and more interesting for it. The franchise earned the right to be complicated.

The Secret Service comic (Millar and Dave Gibbons, 2012) predates the film and reads as a more cynical document: class is a trap, the institutions are rotten, the spy fantasy is class warfare in a tuxedo. Vaughn's adaptation softened that into something more lovable, but the original source remains the sharper object. Millar's Kick-Ass covers similar ground from a superhero angle: wish fulfillment fiction interrogating why we want what we want.

Samuel L. Jackson's Valentine explaining his plan while eating a McDonald's burger is one of the decade's best gags about its own genre. The Kingsman franchise understood that the Bond villain monologue is absurd, leaned all the way in, and made the absurdity the point. The Golden Circle's Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore) carries the same energy: cheerful malevolence dressed in Americana kitsch. These villains work because they are as costume-conscious as the heroes.