‘Kingsman: The Golden Circle’ is a royal pain

No t that anyone has been calling for it, but director Matthew Vaughn’s “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” brings the spy saga back in all its overblown, inconsistent glory. In this ultraviolent farce many innocent people suffer, especially in the audience.

If “Kingsman” fails to run up to the typical trilogy set, I will be relieved. The form isn’t much different from the previous movie, but the execution is excruciating. This second edition becomes uproariously unfunny long before the climax.

The action takes place in a preposterous world where the only important location in London is the opulent Kingsman clothing store, which discerning gentlemen visit to be nattily attired. Behind its sales floor operates a secret British spy service protecting the nation without actually answering to it. No matter how many explosions, gunfights and battles royal the team triggers, police never arrive to ask what’s going on. That is perhaps the only believable notion in the whole affair.

In the last film, Colin Firth played Harry, a debonair secret agent who adopted a street tough named Eggsy ( Taron Egerton) to dress for success and kill off enemies by the score. In that episode, Harry and one other supporting character were killed, but in this universe death is a subjective hypothesis. They return in altered forms to help or hinder Eggsy’s efforts to save the world from a plague of toxic recreational drugs pushed by their new, ever-cheerful but sadistic nemesis, Poppy (Julianne Moore).

As if the first film wasn’t gaudy enough, the second pushes hyperbole into the red zone, packing in every clichéd perception of Americanism and British character. When the English operatives walk through the South American forest, they wear crisp double-breasted suits and knotted ties. Their American counterparts, who hide behind the Statesman bourbon distillery in Kentucky, wear Stetsons and work in a skyscraper-high liquor bottle.

The acting is deeply, deliberately uneven. Repeated visits to the White House play as if Bruce Greenwood’s portrayal of the president is his audition to be Alec Baldwin’s Trump stand-in on “Saturday Night Live.” Pedro Pascal almost scores a hit as a spy who’s a dead ringer for 1970s Burt Reynolds, until his part is undercut by sessions of lasso swinging and bullwhip cracking that would be too much even at a rodeo.

The film was inspired by a British cartoon series written by Mark Millar and drawn by Dave Gibbons. Having never read it, I can’t say how many of the film’s flaws are inherited from the source. But I’d guess the creators would not claim a lot of it for themselves.