James Bond for idiots
“Kingsman: The Golden Circle” offers everything — several bored Oscar winners, two scenes featuring death by meat grinder, Elton John mugging in close-up — except a good time. It’s a tiny bit more bizarre and depraved than the 2014 “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” and I watched it (which I don’t recommend, even if 141 minutes means to you) with the same blank expression and 38-degree head tilt that Halle Berry and valiant Mark Strong bring to their “meanwhile, back at headquarters, staring at computer monitors” routine. If the sequel clicks the way the first “Kingsman” did ($414 million worldwide), then by the fourth sequel the grimace passing for weary, stoic resolve on Colin Firth’s face will get its own franchise: “Kingsman: The Grimace of Lead.”
The Savile Row tailor shop in London remains the posh front for the world-saving spy organization introduced in comic book form by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. When we last saw Harry (Firth), he’d been shot in the head point-blank and was presumed dead. His condition has improved in “The Golden Circle” since the first movie, though he’s lost his memory and half his marbles, and it takes some harsh therapy to get him back in the fight alongside his protege Eggsy (Taron Egerton).
Narratively the movie is made of string, lint and the spit of a thousand ushers. Julianne Moore goes for a demented-cheerleader vibe as the new movie’s wacky supervillain, Poppy, a drug lord with a fetish for ’50s kitsch and Elton John (who plays himself ). Poppy infects millions with a deadly virus, from deep inside the Cambodian jungle. Her robot dogs (?) (!) (or, rather, ?!?) routinely tear apart transgressing henchmen, when they’re not being shoved into the meat grinder for burgers.
The Kingsman gang collaborates with its American counterparts, the men and apparently sole woman (Ms. Berry, staring at screens) of the superspy organization Statesman. This is in Kentucky, where we last saw Harry slaughter a church full of white supremacists in the first movie’s secondmost outlandish scene. (The first showed thenPresident Barack Obama’s head exploding.) In order to locate the antidote for the deadly virus, Eggsy and the Burt Reynolds lookalike agent Whiskey (Pedro Pascal) track the girlfriend (Poppy Delevingne) of the roboticarmed superhenchman (Edward Holcroft) to the Glastonbury music festival. It’s up to Eggsy to to implant a fingertip-mounted bugging device inside the groupie’s genitals. That’s right. I’d say that bit, complete with point-of-view shots of the surveillance microbe slooshing down the water slide at high speed, doesn’t belong in a “Kingsman” movie. But in the worst way, anything goes in a “Kingsman” movie.
I wish I found more of the sick-jokiness funny, as opposed to skeevy. I wish director Matthew Vaughn didn’t shoot every slaughterfest with the same slomo tics and lurches. In theory it’s an approximation of the original illustrations’ graphic novel realm. In practice, it’s a lot of bodies flung and sliced and bounced on pavement, or down a mountainside, to frustratingly little cumulative effect.
For the record, Channing Tatum and Jeff Bridges are in “The Golden Circle,” here and there. Also for the record: Though the Americanization of the sequel’s storyline will likely help at the box office, the movie sells the highly exportable image of America as the most violent, most depraved nation on Earth, judging by the minor players who show up to hassle our well-behaved British heroes in a Kentucky honky tonk.