Barely service-able
I was not the biggest fan of Kingsman: The Secret Service when it opened in 2015. Appallingly violent, borderline misogynistic, stylistically derivative of James Bond, lazily plotted and too damn long, the film nonetheless made enough cash (two-thirds of it overseas) to warrant a sequel, which doubles down on everything that made the original so odious.
My favourite part of that first movie, if you can call it that, was the lack of a romantic subplot, which would have added to the running time. Guess what’s new in this one?
Taron Egerton returns as Eggsy, a millennial superspy, which means he uses social media to locate his prey and track the spread of international evil. First up on both fronts is Charlie (Edward Holcroft), a former Kingsman recruit now working for the forces of dastardliness.
Although Eggsy bests his adversary, the victory comes at a high price. Next thing you know, he and fellow operative Merlin (Mark Strong) are headed to Kentucky to seek help from a sister secret service outfit called Statesman, masquerading as a distillery and fronted by Channing Tatum.
Given that Kingsman 3 is already in the works, I’d love to know what other former colonies’ agencies are called. I’m guessing Vegemite-man, KiwiRailMan and, in Canada, Molson-man with a Quebec offshoot known as Jean-Coutu-man.
I digress, but to be fair so does The Golden Circle, which keeps wandering off to the jungle hideout of its chief villain, Poppy Adams, played by Julianne Moore as a kind of hybrid of Dr. Evil and a ’50s housewife, who makes literal mincemeat out of anyone who crosses her.
Yes, writer Jane Goldman and writer-director Matthew Vaughn have made their film’s evil genius a woman, but the only other female characters of note are girlfriends — Eggsy’s appeared in the last film as a crude sex-joke punchline and stuck around —
KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE ★ out of 5 Cast: Taron Egerton, Channing Tatum, Julianne Moore Director: Matthew Vaughn Duration: 2 h 21 m
and Halle Berry as a member of the Statesman organization, notably the only one with a soft-drink nickname: Alongside agents Tequila, Whiskey and Champagne, she’s Ginger Ale. This is also the sort of movie that decides that if she’s smart, she’d better not be beautiful.
Bookended by over-the-top fight scenes that haven’t been edited so much as puréed, The Golden Circle features a evil-villain blackmail plot that manages to deliver a message that’s confusingly both pro- and anti-drug. (Or maybe I was smoking something before the screening. Or maybe I wasn’t.)
The movie is in love with its techno-gadgetry — everything from killer robo-dogs to lifesaving nanites — and seems eager to ingratiate itself with Bond fans. There’s an action sequence at a ski resort that would have worked quite nicely in a Roger Moore-era Bond outing, if only those films had access to digital effects and no grasp at all of the laws of physics.
Narrative laws get broken as well. The plot lurches along as though its distracted writers were constantly asking themselves only one question: What would look cool next? A fight in a bowling alley? A trip to Glastonbury? Dinner with the King of Sweden? Why not?
What’s most troubling in this mess is the needlessly unanswered questions, as when
(to give but one example) one character distrusts another but refuses to tell anyone why, even when questioned directly. The Kingsman franchise (what a horrible pair of words) doesn’t seem to understand that when you’ve backed yourself into a corner, the easiest solution is to just walk out again.