Still got the golden touch
JAMES Burgess is a 27-year-old performance, drama and theatre graduate. The former Fallibroome High School pupil has attended the BAFTA Film Awards in London every year since 2009, meeting stars such as Dame Helen Mirren, Christian Bale, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emma Thompson. James lives on St Ives Close in Macclesfield. You can visit his website at jabfilmreviews. blogspot.com. Kingsman: The Golden Circle Rating: Showing at Cinemac until Thursday, October 12 IN 2015, director Matthew Vaughn made the first Kingsman film. It was gloriously unapologetic in the irreverence of its own subversiveness.
It knows, as Vaughn does, exactly which elements it’s sending up. So much so that there’s even a scene in the original between Colin Firth’s dapper gentlemen spy and Samuel L. Jackman’s lisping, baseball-capped megalomaniac, where they discuss the many iterations of the spy genre itself.
‘Nowadays they’re all a little serious for my taste… give me a far-fetched theatrical plot any day’.
Now, all the on-thebutton self-referentiality coupled with a knowingly nostalgic whip-smart screenplay gets a sequel.
The second chapter in a proposed trilogy, is even more over-the-top, flashy, brash and gratuitous than the first one.
The only element that’s given a comic-book tone-down this time, is the speed-ramped violence – there’s no equivalent of the infamous church massacre from the original.
We’re back in spy extravagance from the opening scene – a spectacularly-staged sequence in a London taxi.
Eggsy, our charismatic young spy, must tackle everything from deadly bionic arms to American rivals and lethal cablecars, all with sharp orange tuxedos, acerbic oneliners and its tongue firmly inside its cheek.
Taron Egerton, as Eggsy, is so confident and funny delivering all of the above that he really could be a Bond of the future, effortlessly having much more personality than Daniel Craig.
These movies wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining without him at the centre.
Starry new recruits are given nothing to do: Halle Berry and Jeff Bridges are both frustratingly stuck behind desks.
While this film definitely works significantly less well than the original in terms of sheer surprise, shock or invention – it has an even better villain – another terrific performance from Julianne Moore as Poppy, the deceptively sunny proprietor of a Fifties-style diner with a ruthlessness behind her veneers.
In her words: ‘Kingsman is crumpets!’. Why ruin it with a gimmicky cameo from Elton John and lewdness which makes it impossible to determine who it’s aimed at?