Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Kingsman: The Golden Circle more or less regurgitates the same premise as 2015's Kingsman: The Secret Service.  The whole idea of the first film was that dapper English gents could save the world with manners and respect, while all the while engaging in some ridiculous and over the top violence that was too comedic to be offensive.  I liked the original quite a lot, but found much less enthusiasm for the sequel.  It exists not to continue with the story, but only because the first movie raked in some big dough at the box office.

I suspect the first movie was a hit because it was surprising and new to audiences.  This time around, we know exactly what to expect.  In the original, Taron Egerton played Eggsy, a tough British street kid who got roped into the Kingsman Service, a top secret British agency who battle evil all over the world, all the while disguising their operation as an upscale tailor shop.  His mentor was Harry (Colin Firth), who taught him everything he needed to know about manners, proper etiquette and kicking butt when the time arose.  Now, Eggsy is an experienced agent, going on his own adventures.  In the film's opening scene, he is attacked by an old enemy, and it leads to a car chase that is so heavy on the CG special effects, it never once looks real.  We're not watching the sequence unfold, we're simply looking at the obvious and sometimes cartoon-level effects.  The sequence would have the same level of intensity if it were Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd duking it out with each other. 

In his efforts to make this movie bigger, more elaborate and more over the top than the first, co-writer and director Matthew Vaughn has more or less given us overkill in cinematic form.  The action is far too extreme, and while the jokes are broader, they simply do not hit like before.  The special effects and sets do everything they can to distract us from the plot, cast and characters, to the point that the movie resembles a long ride to nowhere in particular.  And given that the movie has the bloated running time of nearly two and a half hours, it's an extremely long ride to nowhere in particular.  Despite the non-stop action and CG-assisted stunts, time passes slowly when you're watching this, to the point that there were a couple times that I thought my watch had stopped.  How desperate is this movie to distract us from the fact that it's basically giving us nothing?  It throws in a celebrity cameo for Sir Elton John just so it can have a celebrity cameo.

The plot: The Kingsman Headquarters has been destroyed, and all of the agents are killed except for Eggsy and his chief handler, Merlin (Mark Strong).  The evil mind behind this act is a drug kingpin named Poppy (Julianne Moore), who looks and talks like a sitcom mom, and has such a strong love for 1950s nostalgia, she has made her entire evil fortress in the middle of the Cambodian Jungle in the form of a quaint 1950s neighborhood which she calls Poppy Land.  She's wiped out the Kingsman as the first step in her plan to legalize all illegal drugs that she traffics.  Her ultimate goal is to put a virus in her drugs that will turn all recreational users of her products into diseased carriers who will uncontrollably start dancing, before they go comatose and die.  She's developed an antidote and wants to blackmail the President of the United States (Bruce Greenwood) into legalizing her drugs.  Poppy has all of her henchmen dress up like 50s-era milkmen and gas station attendees, and surrounds herself with robot guard dogs.

Why, you may ask?  I wish I could tell you.  I honestly have no idea what Vaughn is going for with this character.  Yes, she's kind of a kooky villain, but there's absolutely nothing to her.  We learn nothing of her, her possible history with the Kingsman that would have led to her trying to kill them all, or even much about her overall goals.  We don't even understand why she is so obsessed with 50s pop culture, or why she has Elton John chained to a piano with a shock collar, and forces him to play for her.  As a villain, she's a total non-entity.  It would seem that Moore, one of our most talented actresses, didn't even have a grasp on her, as she fails to give the slightest bit of interest to her performance.  I was about to say that this could be a possible record low point in her career, but then I remembered her appearance in the 2000 Saturday Night Live film spin off, The Ladies Man.  Regardless, it's still a terrible performance, but at least it's understandable, since it's a terrible character.

In order to combat Poppy and her henchmen, Eggsy and Merlin turn to the American division of the Kingsman.  They're called The Statesman, make their headquarters in a liquor factory, are all named after drinks, and basically all talk like Southern-Fried stereotypes that are about as authentic as Foghorn Leghorn.  They're led by good ol' boy Champ (Jeff Bridges, slurring his words as usual), and the agents include Ginger Ale (Halle Berry), Tequila (Channing Tatum) and Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), who comes armed with an electric cowboy lasso that can cut people in two.  Many of these characters are introduced, and then go out of their way to contribute nothing to the film.  Channing Tatum in particular gets a big introduction scene, but then spends the rest of his screen time unconscious.  Halle Berry mostly sits in front of a computer in all of her scenes.  As for Bridges, he simply sits behind a desk, and looks like he is simply waiting for his scene to end.  Why go out of your way to introduce these characters and cast expensive actors if you're not even going to use them?

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is as bad as the last Kingsman movie was good.  Yes, the original had its flaws, but it was a lot of fun and had some memorable characters and action sequences.  Here, everything has been turned up and intensified to such an extreme that everything that made the first film work gets lost in the chaos.  Yes, the movie is well made for the most part, but then how could it not be with some of the talent it managed to sucker into appearing in it?  And when you consider how little these talented actors are given to do by the script, it resembles a giant tease.  The first movie had a kind of devilish glee behind it, like the actors knew that it was ridiculous, but they were having a blast anyway.  In the sequel, the returning actors look like they're being swallowed up by the overblown tone, while the new cast members seem to be wondering what they're doing here.

I wish I could say that there was one bright spot here.  A performance that stood out, or maybe a moment that made me laugh.  As the movie rapidly leaves my brain mere hours after my screening got out, all I can remember is feeling annoyed and angry while I was watching it.  There's no excuse to spend almost two and a half hours being annoyed or angry.  Maybe diehard fans of the first will get something here, but it will be a diluted sense of entertainment compared to the original.

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