SHAKEN AND STIRRED!
Lashings of sex, violence and drugs, but the return of this Bond spoof is glorious fun
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (15) Verdict: High-octane sequel hits the target ★★★★✩
Kingsman: The golden Circle hits the ground running with a Keystone Kops car chase involving a black cab, a robotic arm and a rocket launcher. as you’d expect from this unapologetic celebration of British style, the good guy is in the black cab — at least, i think it’s a cab. at one point it turns into a submarine. not so much an Uber as a scuba.
Bond aficionados will recognise the submersible as a nod to Roger moore’s Lotus Esprit s1 in The spy Who Loved me.
Kingsman: The golden Circle, the first in what promises to be a long line of sequels, is both a homage to Britain’s most successful film franchise and a bold attempt to recover some of its fizz.
Eggsy, the central character played by Taron Egerton, is a cross between David niven in Casino Royale and michael Caine in The ipcress File, and his irrepressible, cheeky chappie persona infuses proceedings.
it’s like a Bond film remade by the team behind Lock, stock and Two smoking Barrels, with more swearing and better jokes. it’s also patriotic in a way that feels more in keeping with ian Fleming’s original novels than the latest crop of Bond movies.
The picture boasts an allstar cast, but a fair number of them get dispatched in the first ten minutes when a drug cartel launches a sneak attack. For those who missed the first outing, the Kingsmen are a group of smooth, umbrella-carrying spies, answerable to their own chivalric code rather than the Prime minister. Like director matthew Vaughn’s other successful franchise — the Kick-ass films — the idea came from a comic book created by mark millar, who is quickly becoming Britain’s answer to stan Lee, the brains behind the marvel empire. The only survivors of the attack are Eggsy and merlin, the Q-like character played by mark strong. soon, they’ve found their way to a bourbon whiskey distillery in Kentucky and linked up with their american counterparts — the statesmen. This is an excuse to unveil another host of stars, including Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges and Halle Berry, who is slightly wasted in the role of the faithful techie — a staple in such action blockbusters.
some of the best scenes are set in the villain’s secret lair, Poppyland in Cambodia, where Poppy — the head of the drug cartel (played with scenerychewing relish by Julianne moore) — has created a Fifties american town that looks like a recycled set from Back To The Future.
she holds court in the diner where she’s guarded by two robotic dogs and feeds her under-performing henchmen into a giant meat-grinder.
One of the unexpected treats is a cameo by sir Elton John, who’s being held captive in Poppyland and forced to perform his seventies hits before an audience of bored drug kingpins. He delivers a
convincing turn as an affronted diva who seizes the chance to take revenge on his jailors with a bloodthirsty zeal.
Not everything in the film works. At two hours and 20 minutes, it feels a tad over-long, and the sprawling story doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. Poppy smuggles a lethal virus into her product and, after it has infected millions of recreational drug-users, offers to release the antidote on condition that the president of the U.S. legalises her contraband.
Eh? Why would the female equivalent of Pablo Escobar hatch a plot to enable her to pay tax on her vast profits? Al Capone would be appalled.
There’s also a romantic subplot involving Eggsy’s attempts to settle down with a Swedish princess that’s so dull even the makers of the film lose interest after the two-hour mark.
The emotional heart of the film is really the bromance between Eggsy and Harry Hart (Colin Firth), his mentor from the first film. Harry was killed off in the first film, but Vaughn and his screenwriter Jane Goldman have wisely decided to resurrect him for the sequel.
In the first film, Hart’s job was to transform Eggsy into a perfect English gentleman as well as a spy — Henry Higgins to Egerton’s Eliza Doolittle.
There’s less for Firth to do in the sequel, but the scenes between him and Egerton have an emotional weight that stop the film disappearing into a whirlpool of silliness.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a bit baggier than the original, puffed up by a bigger budget and more star power. But it is hugely entertaining nonetheless, full of wit and invention.
I don’t suppose Kingsman will ever replace Bond, but it provides a welcome counterpoint to a franchise that has become too politically correct.
If it’s sex and violence you’re after, leavened by plenty of arch humour, Kingsman delivers.