Summary
The well-dressed spies are back, showing the upstart colonials how manners maketh man. Overblown, crazy, and filled with boundary-pushing innuendo. So in other words, it’s a Kingsman film.
Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Kingsman: The Secret Service, based on a comic by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, brought an irreverent sense of fun and a much-needed lancing of the British spy flick. While it doesn’t quite have the roguish charm of its untested predecessor, KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE maintains the same ridiculous sense of fun.
Picking up a year after the events of the first film, fully fledged Kingsman Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton) has taken on the Galahad mantle. However, after being ambushed by an old foe, a chain of events leads him to a global plot run by global pharmaceutical queen Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), and the surprising return of an old friend or two.
From the opening scene, in which a CG enhanced Minicab is chased across London’s streets with Eggsy hanging out the side, it’s clear that Vaughn isn’t going to waste any time in ramping up the action this time around. As expected, this culminates in an completely bonkers sequence on a cable car in the mountains, filled with mid-air electric whips and near crashes. This batshit escalation is what we love about the series, and its always fun even if it doesn’t make literal sense at times.
A shift to the US, and a parallel whisk(e)y producing secret service called The Statesmen, is an obvious move but one that provides plenty of opportunities for the American stars to shine. Halle Berry’s demure Ginger Ale plays against type, and has some engaging scenes opposite Mark Strong. Pedro Pascal is wonderful as the nutty whip-totin’ good ol’ boy Whiskey, while Channing Tatum’s brief role as Tequila is mostly there to set up his future in the franchise.
Yet it’s the perkily menacing Julianne Moore who steals every scene she is in, even if those scenes are confined to a single location. Mind you, that location is a vast series of ruins that have been converted into a sinister version of 1950s small town America, complete with robotic dogs and beauticians. What she does with the meat grinder may rival Fargo in its memorable screen exits.
On the other hand, if you found some of the sexual politics of the first film questionable, this film may turn you off further. There’s a story thread that involves Eggsy needing to plant a tracker on a female mark, one that can only be achieved via digital penetration, including a point-of-view tracking shot of its progress. Is this really ok in 2017?
In between the weird politics on the war on drugs, and a convenient subplot about retrograde amnesia, Vaughn’s film is insanely fun. Any film where 90% of Elton John’s dialogue is “Fuck you” has to have something going for it, right? Naturally, the door is also left wide open for the further adventures of the well-tailored spies, and we are definitely left on a note where that would be a welcome prospect.
