KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
Matthew Vaughn, 2017
When a British spy agency is attacked by a drug cartel, its surviving members must join forces with their American counterparts.
I've had a complicated connection to
Kingsman: The Secret Service. The 2015 sleeper hit about a lower-class lad joining an upper-class spy agency seemed like the kind of irreverent action-comedy that I'd have straight-up loved if I'd been ten years younger, but as it was I ended up feeling lukewarm about its inconsistent attempts at blending smarmy satire with cartoonish brutality. However, it stuck with me in a way that few other films of its ilk have done and grew on me to the point where I was actively looking forward to the sequel that promised to go bigger and better. Of course, there was always the matter of what exactly I was hoping to get from a sequel - something that managed to build upon the colourful spy-pastiche world it established and perhaps even elaborate upon the intriguing class-warfare subtext, which was not an unreasonable expectation given how
The Golden Circle promised to develop a whole new facet of this world by introducing the Statesmen, an American equivalent of the British Kingsmen. Of course, there was always the concern that it could fall into the usual sequel traps and deliver something that either felt inessential or actively undermined its predecessor - unfortunately, there's plenty about
The Golden Circle that justifies those particular fears.
After beginning with a blistering set-piece involving a taxi cab and a vengeful cyborg,
The Golden Circle soon settles into an especially turgid rhythm as it catches us up to speed on main man Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and how he struggles to balance his secret agent activities with his increasingly public relationship to Swedish princess Tilde (Hanna Alström). This particular subplot is what really sets the tone for the film as this 141-minute film throws out all sorts of narrative threads that are either overly expanded upon (like the romantic conflict between Eggsy and the princess) or frustratingly underdeveloped (such as Sophie Cookson as fellow agent Roxy being sidelined despite the character's considerable potential). This rings especially true once Eggsy and tech wizard Merlin (Mark Strong) are forced by circumstances to make their way to America in order to connect with the Statesmen, who have also happened to revive presumed-dead agent Harry (Colin Firth) in a state of headshot-induced amnesia. While there are glimmers of emotional resonance to be found in these myriad throughlines, they are few and far between as you have to put up with all sorts of diversions that come across as cinematic white noise (with a prominent example involving Eggsy making a trip to the famed Glastonbury music festival and providing a sequence that may well outdo the original film's notorious final joke in terms of being objectionable). Knowing that Vaughn cut this version down from a 220-minute cut is staggering - if this is how the theatrical cut turned out, I can't even imagine what they left out.
Even when you do look past
The Golden Circle's frequently tiresome pacing and filler to focus on the meat of the film, you will find the same flaws that plagued the original (often to a greater degree). The original had a significant amount of subtextual inconsistency due to trying to approach political concepts like class warfare, climate change, and neoliberalism in the middle of a semi-satirical action movie that couldn't quite seem to figure out how much it wanted to deconstruct or indulge its genre trappings. The sequel takes it to another level with main villain Poppy (Julianne Moore), a chirpy all-American drug baroness whose various obsessions and motivations reflect issues such as toxic nostalgia, capitalistic cruelty, and white corporate feminism. This should make for a good villain (and Moore is certainly solid in the role), but in the context of the film's greater plot that attempts to satirise both sides of the War on Drugs and also gives its other female characters some rather short shrift in comparison (especially Halle Berry's tech-support character being used to prop up other characters' arcs while barely having one of her own), it's as loose and negligible as anything else in the film. At least it means that we get an appropriately garish 1950s-themed lair (which does kind of make for a good visual foil against the Statesmen's Western theme that juxtaposes two different types of American identity), but even a franchise that's as much about self-professed exercises in genre fun as
Kingsman is should know that there's got to be more to telling an involving story than just throwing together whatever cool-looking concepts a creator can imagine in the hopes that it'll make sense after the fact (which is definitely the case with the Statesmen disguising their headquarters as a whisky distillery, prompting speculation as to whether they're that much better for the world than the drug-dealing Poppy).
That's not to say that
The Golden Circle necessarily lacks for cool-looking concepts, even when there are some problems with the execution. Unlike most people, I had my issues with the original's infamous church sequence - at the end of the day, there's only so much fun you can really have with watching a person be forcibly brainwashed into a killing spree (even if it is against deranged bigots). None of the action scenes in
The Golden Circle have that kind of questionable context, but that doesn't stop them from suffering the same fate that the original's third-act action scenes did in having to follow the sharp escalation provided by the church scene. The issues with escalation are even more pronounced as this film peaks in its very first scene and then struggles to come up with much of worth until one very protracted third-act showdown. Individual scenes may be solid, but they are let down by their placement within the film's greater context being either too far apart or too close together. It's enough to really highlight the flaws in Vaughn's visibly artificial approach to structuring and filming action scenes that involves rapidly adjusting the framerate back and forth or stitching together visibly digitised takes. Even laying down some peppy needle-drops only goes so far in compensating for his characteristically rough-looking approach to what should be clean displays of sound and fury.
For all the complaints I've made about
Kingsman: The Secret Service (and they are legion), I can ultimately concede that its narrow focus on delivering a functional and flavourful spy narrative can compensate for the moments where the flavours are a little too strong for their own good.
The Golden Circle may have similar issues that can (and likely will) leave a bad taste in your mouth, but even those moments are overwhelmed by the dullness that fills the film like headshot-healing gel fills a high-tech bandage. Even without being aware of an even longer version of the movie, this still feels like a film that's pulling in too many directions to deliver a consistently appreciable experience. Promising facets are disregarded or outright destroyed while even the characters and threads that are given extra attention don't pan out too much in the end anyway. Even the re-introduction of key qualities from the original such as the action scenes or the core ensemble of Egerton, Strong, and Firth can only do so much to actually maintain one's investment in the proceedings, leaving the film as a whole to fizzle rather than explode. Though it doesn't sound like you can rule out a third movie just yet, I'd certainly hope that Vaughn and co. learn from the most egregious mistakes that were made with
The Golden Circle. For all the taglines about this being "a
proper spy movie", it's certainly got a long way to go in that regard.