Kingsman: The Golden Circle Review: Everything's Bigger In America, for Better or for Worse

The follow-up to one of the great spy-thrillers of our time will satisfy just about everybody but the diehard Kingsman fans.
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Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015) is one of the best spy movies in decades. What should by all rights have been a silly, subversive oddity became something much greater: examining the tropes of the "hero" (with many a pointed jab at James Bond, in particular), the inevitable bloodshed that comes with "saving the world," and reveling in no small amount of said bloodshed for the sake of its viewers.

Its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, at least has that last part down. If The Secret Service was a film school essay, The Golden Circle is the dorm party after finals are done.

The film wastes no time in getting to the good stuff. The very first scene is a plot-driven action set piece. Eggsy (Taron Egerton), the young London lad who got My Fair Lady-d in the first film by Colin Firth, is just exiting the Kingsman headquarters when he's attacked by Charlie Hesketh, one of the rejected Kingsman recruits from the first movie, now sporting a fancy new robotic arm. The two exchange blows inside a black cab during a very well-worked car chase, Eggsy manages to lose his assailants, and the robot arm hacks the Kingsman mainframe. This all happens in the first five minutes or so.

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From there, well, you can see where this is going. The Kingsman becomes exposed, a mysterious villain launches an attack on all the agents, leaving only Eggsy—codename "Galahad"—and Merlin (Mark Strong) to pick up the pieces. With that, they recruit the help of Kingsman's U.S.-based cousins, the Staesman, a similar organization that swaps out legendary knight codenames for hard liquor ("Whiskey," "Tequila," and, uh, "Ginger Ale," for example), and a camouflage front as a bespoke tailors for a huge distillery in Kentucky.

The Statesman agents are well-cast, and well-poised to make this a franchise entry that surpasses its predecessor, at least financially. Channing Tatum as Agent Tequila gets some wonderful, unexpectedly sinister moments before virtually disappearing from the film. Jeff Bridges does his thing as Champagne, the head of Statesman. He sits in a chair, spouts off a few cheeky one-liners, and, as Bridges tends to do, effortlessly makes everyone else in the room look like a common fool who's never seriously acted in their damn lives. The Statesman, however hospitable, are much more brash than their counterparts across the pond: Eggsy exchanges strong words with agents Tequila and Whiskey (a perfectly fine Pedro Pascal), and tensions between the two organizations only heighten when they discover the previous Galahad (Colin Firth) is alive and well and locked in the Statesman basement.

The decision to bring back Firth, the victim of a point-blank gunshot to the head in the first movie, is both a no-brainer and curious. Firth was a coup for the scrappy, crass action movie that was The Secret Service. In The Golden Circle, he's a bit more at sea. Predictably, his resurrection is the result of a quite nonsensical "deus ex machina" piece of technology, one of about twenty such examples in the film.

The film's overstuffed cast leads to inevitable sloppiness; the first hour of the film feels like a series of barely-connected vignettes, getting us up to speed, albeit with some very Kingsman-like scene transitions (in one particularly ridiculous moment, we close in on a massive bag of weed that then becomes... a lush rainforst).

"I thought everything was supposed to be bigger in America," Eggsy says at one point in the movie, and indeed it is. The Golden Circle doubles down on a lot of the first film's ugliness without nearly as much of the thought that went into crafting that movie's most challenging moments. The infamous anal sex joke from The Secret Service gets not one but two callbacks. If it were possible, female characters are even more shortchanged than in the first film. This includes the borderline offensive treatment of one of the original's bright spots, who is removed from the picture early on, presumably to facilitate a ridiculous cameo that far outstays its welcome.

The Golden Circle doubles down on a lot of the first film's ugliness without nearly as much of the thought that went into engineering that movie's most challenging moments.

Julianne Moore as Poppy, the villain, makes the most of her relatively few scenes. She's not fully rounded out, and while her motivations are clear, they don't quite work. Without spoiling much, her main mission is to end the war on drugs in the U.S., thus allowing her to operate her narcotics empire legally (she operates out of Cambodia in a small resort she calls "PoppyLand," complete with an American-style diner and movie theater). It's in Poppy's plan that the film starts to struggle under the weight of its desire to be as cool, fun, and fast as possible. The Secret Service, for all its flaws, was about something, and had real statements to make and ideas to examine about class and poverty, both at home and abroad. Poppy's criticisms of the U.S.'s war on drugs are more than valid: It's a broken, expensive, racist program that has had minimal effect other than the overcrowding of prisons across the country. We never quite get there, though, and the result is a not-altogether-interesting apocalypse scenario with only the smallest amount of worthwhile social commentary.

A bright spot amidst the messiness is, of course, Egerton, who toes the line between a quintessential gentleman and rough-around-the-edges East London boy. His well-dressed, well-spoken demeanor is punctuated by the occasional "bruv" and some trademark cockiness. He's only seen a handful of credits but make no mistake, he's already a movie star. Mark Strong as Merlin also gets much more to do, moving from behind a control center to help form the film's central emotional arc (complete with a lot of John Denver singing). he's magnificent, and props to the filmmakers for recognizing he deserved a bigger, better role.

There's a scene in the first Kingsman in which Colin Firth, our protagonist, attends a "hate-church" in Kentucky where the pastor is spewing all kinds of bile about "Jews" and "homos." Suddenly, he and all the other church attendees are the targets of a high-frequency signal sent through their phones (it's a whole thing) that turns them all into uninhibited, bloodthirsty maniacs. It’s a cacophony of chaos; a ridiculous bloodbath between roughly a hundred people who, for all intents and purposes, are completely innocent. It’s a celebration of bad taste that has its cake and eats it, too. Our hero, the previously gentlemanly Firth, is the greatest villain of all in this scene, dispatching men and women indiscriminately in all manner of horrifying ways. It's shocking and ugly. It also, however, casts a serious accusation over its audience, asking, “Isn’t this what you wanted to see, deep down?”

That one scene (which, by the way, is scored to "Freebird," of all fucking songs) is smarter, deeper, and just plain better than anything in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which seeks to reverse-engineer several key scenes from its predecessor to invariably diminishing returns. For a movie series that takes so much pride in being "itself," it seems screenwriters Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman were almost afraid to pull the trigger once again on an entirely original, risky movie.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a successful sequel that, despite its many standout moments, plays it safe within the scope of the world it already built. It will widely satisfy, but for fans who have followed Vaughn, Goldman, and Eggsy previously, that's a bit of a letdown.


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