KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE - A Juvenile Product of the Working Class

Director: Matthew Vaughn
Writers: Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn
Cast: Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Julianne Moore, Colin Firth, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, Jeff Bridges, Edward Holcroft, Hanna Alström, Elton John
Runtime: 141 mins.
2017

Matthew Vaughn is known as a director who doesn't return for sequels. It's easy to see why after Kingsman: The Golden Circle. All of the familiar Kingsman elements are back: edgy humor, slick aesthetic, zippy action, quirky characters, a maniac villain at the helm of a world-threatening plot. The issue is that none of them congeal into anything of note. Every aspect of the film feels like it has reported dutifully to the set, ready but not enthusiastic about another day's work.

At 141 minutes, we're talking about a long time of feeling nothing in particular. The Golden Circle's problems issue outward from the script. Goldman and Vaughn are longtime writing partners, but their heart wasn't in this one. Kingsman: The Secret Service had a great structure to hang its narrative on: no-name kid gets recruited into a secret agent training program and while trying to prove himself gets tangled up in a larger plot. The Golden Circle has no such elegant structure, instead opting for the scattershot approach. Over here we have a secret agent trying to figure out who killed his organization, over here we have a crazy villain abusing her henchman somewhere in the jungle, over here we have the American version of the Kingsmen, over here we have a romance and fidelity plot, over here Harry (Colin Firth) is alive but suffering memory loss. These vignettes cut between each other without any cross-pollination for so long that you begin to wonder why you should care about any thread in particular. So much of it feels tacked on, especially the gutless Harry subplot that apparently exists just to rekindle the most resonant central relationship from the first movie. Instead we spend a lot of pointless time listening to a brain damaged Harry talk about butterflies.

The franchise's irreverence too falls flat here. The Secret Service culminated in an all-time great climactic gag (the fireworks). Nothing even comes close in The Golden Circle, and the attempts, like a grotesquely comic butchery and cannibalism scene, feel like they're trying way too hard to fit the Kingsman mold. Just so with the action setpieces. The creative team seems to have looked to the infamous church massacre from The Secret Service, a supremely disorienting piece of carnage facilitated by a woozy shakycam, and decided to apply that aesthetic to all of The Golden Circle's action. What we end up with is barely comprehensible whiplash action filmmaking, regardless of the tone each particular action scene is trying to strike. The action itself is often cool, but hard to follow. It is yet another flattening of what made The Secret Service dynamic.

This laziness extends to important characters like Roxy (Sophie Cookson), who gets ousted from the film in the most unceremonious of ways. Channing Tatum's character is introduced, then almost immediately contracts an illness that takes him out of most of the movie. Poppy (Julianne Moore), the main villain, is utterly wasted as the movie chugs forward. Moore summons up a delightfully unhinged performance that could have rivaled Samuel L. Jackson's work in the first movie had she been integrated into the plot in any significant way whatsoever. Our main characters, if I recall correctly, get a grand total of one scene with Poppy. Moore chews scenery like nobody's business, but she can only salvage so much in such a disconnected role.

Even Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is at a loss for an arc now that he's already proven himself. Since he apparently has nothing left to learn, character drama is artificially inserted into the film in the shape of his now girlfriend, Princess Tilde (Hanna Alström). This is traded off with the manufactured drama between Eggsy and Harry, neither of which work particularly well.

Speaking of dubious insertions, Elton John is in this movie. He plays Elton John. Poppy kidnaps him so he can play music for her, but the real reason Elton John is in this movie is so that Goldman and Vaughn can make the beloved icon drop f-bombs amidst a bunch of jokey jokes about the artist's oeuvre. It's kind of funny, but only in an abstract way. Mostly it's a heinous waste of an extended cameo, once again entirely disconnected from the rest of the proceedings.

There are proper good ideas behind this follow-up to what should be an easily franchise-able property, but the same driving engine is not present. The two Kingsman films make for a great case study on how a good movie is far more than the sum of its parts.

1.5 / 5  BLOBS