Kingsman: The Golden Circle - Disappointing dud
After 19 years of successful films, Matthew Vaughn meets his creative match in his first time attempt at a sequel to beloved spy parody Kingsman: The Secret Service.
A year since Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton) stopped the worldwide terrorist attack of Richmond Valentine, the young Kingsman secret agent must stop a new plot conjured up by Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), the leader of the world’s largest drug cartel and a lover of 50’s nostalgia. With his fellow Kingsman agents unavailable, Eggsy and Merlin (Mark Strong) must travel to the United States and get acquainted with their American brothers in arms: The Statesmen, a super secret spy organization masquerading as a Bourbon whiskey distillery company. Teaming up with head Statesmen agent Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), Eggsy must get a new handful of gadgets and rescue his insomniac-ridden partner Harry Hart (Colin Firth) before Poppy’s plan ends civilization as we know it.
Matthew Vaughn is an absolutely fantastic director, but sadly Kingsman: The Golden Circle is his worst movie. Worst things could be said though. Vaughn has never directed a bad film at this point and The Golden Circle falls more on the disappointingly mediocre side of the bad movie spectrum rather than the absolutely horrid side.
The film is frantically paced in a nauseating way. Characters hop to as many colorful locations as the budget can manage without any worthwhile explanation. Scenes happen to move the plot along with no consideration for their absurdity or cultural impact. While it’s odd to call the Kingsman series overly absurd when its existence is thanks to the absurd and silly nature of the Roger Moore Bond films of the 70’s, but The Golden Circle is too overtly crass and odd. An entire sequence hinges on an idea so sexist, ending with a pretty excessive image that even John Wayne would’ve cringed at the thought.
That’s the problem with The Golden Circle though. It’s all too much without the right to be. Moore is fantastic as Poppy but her aesthetic of 50’s nostalgia and love of robotic minions feels tacked on for absolutely no discernable reason. Characters like Champagne (Jeff Bridges) and Tequila (Channing Tatum), two members of the Statesmen, make brilliant first impressions before being cast to the wayside. The Golden Circle even goes to lengths to kill the most emotional gutpunch of its predecessor by retconning the death of Firth’s Harry Hart. It’s all a hodge podge of things that dazzle and distract but make for a really messy plot that is trying to cover too many evil lairs at once.
Another element of the plot that falls completely flat is the message. While the first Kingsman film concerned itself with themes of corporate greed, obsession with technology and fear of technical terrorism, The Golden Circle takes on the war on drugs as a topic. Though Vaughn’s thoughts on the topic seem completely scattered. You can tell that he doesn’t see people who take drugs as villains but he also does somewhat cast an ill-conceived view of the world where everyone takes drugs but also is hypocritical in their desire to eliminate drugs. It’s also impossible to tell if Vaughn believes Poppy’s ideas of drugs being in a free market is a good idea, or if he is trying to say Poppy’s ideas are crazy just as her. Vaughn seemed like he wanted to make a political statement here, but he never stopped to think if he should, or if he actually had any compelling or structured ideas about the topic.
The Golden Circle isn’t all bad though. It’s hard to say that it isn’t a fun film throughout most of its runtime. The jokes land with precision, Egerton is charming and affable as always as a young man from the streets who uses both his manners and street-wise intelligence to get what he wants. Pascal is fantastic as Whiskey in every sense of the word, and the character is a treat as well. For all of the film’s faults it’s biggest strength is that somehow Vaughn made trick roping look cool and made it a viable and believable combat technique.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a disappointment in every sense of the word. It unnecessarily resurrects a main character, one of the film’s pivotal sequences is groan-worthy, it’s absurd to the point of being a serious version of an Austin Powers film and it is too overstuffed to be thematically coherent or make any of its moments of forced emotion feel earned. It’s action is fun and stylistic, but all its other elements weigh it down. This lighter grenade is a total dud.