‘KINGSMAN’ SEQUEL IS A BIT OF A BUZZKILL
John Denver is having a great year for a dead guy. His hit song Take Me Home,
Country Roads finds its way into not one movie soundtrack, but two this year — Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, and now Kingsman: The Golden Circle, sequel to Matthew Vaughn’s hyperkinetic 2014 British agent thriller.
Sir Elton John, too, gets a revival, or at least an extended cameo playing himself in this manic follow-up, ass-kicking glitter boots and all. Other than ‘70s nostalgia, is there any connection between the two? Who knows? Asking such questions while watching a Kingsman movie is a major buzzkill. Though less of a rush than Kingsman:
The Secret Service, the overlong (141-minute) sequel is equally violent (finding inventive new ways to slay bad guys, like impaling them on an outsized pair of scissors), immaculately tailored, and features one majorly cartoonish villain (Julianne Moore), not unlike Samuel L. Jackson’s lisping character in the original.
Bringing the smirking, nattily-dressed agent Eggsy (Taron Egerton), logistics wizard Merlin (Matthew Strong) and Colin Firth (Agent Harry Hart, presumably eliminated in the original) back into the Kingsman fold is a short-lived pleasure, as they’re soon forced to team up with their American counterpart agents — the “Statesmen,” geddit? — led by Jeff Bridges, with an all-too-brief appearance by Channing Tatum (Agent Tequila) and some fancy whip work from Pedro Pascal (Agent Whiskey). They naturally don’t see eye-to-eye on sartorial choices, the King’s English, or the proper spelling of “whisky.”
The object for the united team is to track down an antidote held in a secret location by drug lord Poppy Adams (Moore), who is wreaking havoc on her customers by slipping a deadly toxin into their regular supply of cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin. The play? To get world governments to legalize her drugs, or else she’ll just let all those recreational and hard-core drug users die.
That doesn’t sound like a threat that would bother President Duterte or most conservative politicians in the United States much, but for the purposes of Kingsman: The Golden Circle, it qualifies as “plot.” Mainly, this sequel is interested in getting Eggsy and his down-posh British accent into situations involving elaborate, rotating camera work, impossible stunts and frequent bloodletting, sometimes all at once. The first
Kingsman was mostly a showcase for Vaughn’s kicky though eventually exhausting visual style — same with The Golden Circle, where a simple 007-type car chase turns into a 10-minute parade of death-defying parries that admittedly looks cooler when one protagonist is wearing a Savile Row suit.
But for all of the lip service paid to matters of gentlemanly taste, this is a fairly tasteless affair. Heads roll, blood gushes messily, and Sir Elton is a huge fan of the F-bomb, which he drops as regularly as a boogiewoogie piano vamp.
The Golden Circle probably also features the most confused drug message I’ve yet encountered in modern Hollywood entertainment. Drug lord Poppy lives in a remote enclave, controlling most of the world’s narcotics and distribution. But she wants more: specifically, she wants a “Forbes 500” listing. With her ’50s-style gangster lair (where every salon, cinema and diner bears her name), she’s meant to project madder-than-mad psychotic ruthlessness, plus a touch of cannibalism. But she seems just like any ordinary suburban soccer mom, despite her fondness for mansize meat grinders.
Even more confusing is her master plan, which involves dosing her customers with a toxin that first turns them all blue veiny and gross (it certainly makes it easier to spot drug users), then leads to manic dancing, paralysis and eventual ugly, explosive death. Sounds like the usual pathway of drug use and addiction, exaggerated for Hollywood effect; but the movie also tries to posit a sympathetic view of recreational drug use, beyond the “drug war” headlines.
Yet it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the druggies here, who engage in casual sex and casual inhaling at Glastonbury Festival, or hit the glass pipe in cheapo London flats, like Eggsy’s pal Charlie. First of all, they look pretty gross, with the blue veins and all; secondly, their “mania” leads to involuntary dancing that is way more annoying than alarming.
The script, written (possibly with chemical assistance) by Vaughn and Jane Goldman, offers a rather confusing voice to the ongoing drug debate. While it acknowledges that drug addicts should be treated with compassion and treatment, it offers such a visually repugnant view of them — blue-faced, twitchy and paralyzed — that you end up feeling like they brought it upon themselves.
Muddled and Teflon-slick in its surfaces without ever going deeper than an off-the-rack suit, Kingsman: The Golden Circle will probably appeal to those seeking state-ofthe-art techno thrills — and perhaps the sight of Elton John once again adorned in bird feathers — but not much else.