New set of spies, same old tricks
Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges Saving the world in style. KINGSMAN: The Golden Circle, the sequel to the 2015 secret-agent smash Kingsman: The Secret Service, swaggers along the line separating bold from boorish, cool from crass, Die Hard from try-hard.
It’s a tough balancing act to pull off, and no matter how sure a film’s footing may be it’s inevitably going to end up wobbling on to either side of that line from time to time.
Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn, making his first sequel, is an accomplished enough showman and ringmaster to keep things moving along briskly and energetically (seriously, for a 2½-hour movie, The Golden Circle is pacy).
But he also has some issues with taste, it seems. There are a fair few moments here that are cynically, calculatingly outrageous, to a degree where you can almost sense the creators sniggering behind the camera at how inventively irreverent they are.
Sometimes it works, and works great. But there are far more occasions when The Golden Circle’s go-for-broke moments inspire little more than a shrug.
And there’s also an unfortunate sense of repetition at play here, as if Vaughn and his team take what worked in The Secret Service (or at the very least what got audiences talking), and double down on it.
I mean, you liked that one-take scene of carnage where a gun-toting Colin Firth blew away everyone in the room, right? Here you go, a few variations on that sequence.
And you were amused (or maybe scandalised) by the previous film’s allegedly sexy innuendo, weren’t you? Here, have some more!
“Here, have some more” seems to be The Golden Circle’s guiding principle, and while a little indulgence can be pleasurable once in a while, loading up on this movie’s empty calories may leave you strangely hollow.
Our hero, former car thief and street thug “Eggsy” (likeable, talented Taron Egerton), is now a fully-fledged member of the well-tailored, well-armed and rather posh independent spy agency Kingsman, even inheriting the code- name of his late mentor Harry (Firth) — “Galahad”.
But having found his place in the world, Eggsy suddenly finds all stripped away when nearly every other Kingsman operative is blown to bits by Poppy (Julianne Moore), an alarmingly chipper drug baron eager to legitimise her multibillion-dollar narcotics business by way of global poisoning and presidential blackmail.
With only Eggsy and tech support whiz Merlin (Mark Strong) left to carry on the Kingsman name, a little backup will be required to foil Poppy’s dastardly scheme.
Enter the Statesmen, the Kingsman agency’s American counterpart. Based in a Kentucky bourbon distillery and led by a Stetson-wearing Jeff Bridges, they’re hi-tech cowboys armed with state-ofthe-art six-shooters, lassos and bullwhips.
Oh, and they also have a special guest in their sick bay — none other than Harry, because why should the bullet he took to the head in the previous movie keep him from taking part in the sequel?
It’s nice to see Firth back. And Moore plays a monstrous megalomaniac with a butter-wouldn’t-melt sweetness.