The first Kingsman movie (which we now apparently have to refer to as “Kingsman: The Secret Service“) was a cultural phenomenon. People lined the streets outside the theatre like it was a modern day Jaws, purchasing ticket after ticket, buying Mark Strong action figures and practicing their best Sam Jackson lisps.
At least, that’s what its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle would have you think.
Within the first twenty minutes of the newest installment of this fledgling franchise, I counted at least five callbacks to its predecessor, treating past plot points with the same off-handed reverence as, say, “the garbage will do” in The Force Awakens. The script reintroduces gadgets, accessories and characters at a brisk, winking pace, assuming the audience’s immediate familiarity.
Did I miss something?
If my rewatch on cable a month ago is correct, The Secret Service was a serviceable film, a solid action comedy buoyed at the box office by the surprising originality that Mark Millar and Matthew Vaughn peppered into their comic book script. It was fun, different and a little campy, using well-choreographed action and surprising characters to tell a good story.
It was not, however, a cultural touchpoint.
With all that being said, its sequel forgets what made the original … original, replacing it with choppy fight scenes, a bloated plot, a Trump stand-in and the worst CGI I have seen in a major blockbuster since Wolverine’s claws in Wolverine: Origins.
As the trailers reveal (spoiler), the character and world building of the first film are literally blown apart within the first act of the film, attempting to create a sense of drama and desperation for Eggsy (played by Taron Egerton, who decides that a cockney accent just means adding “bruv” to the end of every sentence.) The drama and tension that these cheap deaths bring to the script, however, are even further cheapened by bringing back to life Colin Firth’s character, the only meaningful death from The Secret Service. We spend half the movie trying to bring him “back,” while that time could have been spent giving other characters some basic character development.
Newcomers Julianne Moore and Channing Tatum do nothing to elevate the movie, with the former not realizing that “scenery chewing” isn’t always a good thing and the latter literally disappearing for the second half of the movie (presumably to film Magic Mike 3XL or something similarly high-brow.) Jeff Bridges is apparently also in this movie, although if you go to the bathroom during the film, you could potentially miss his two scenes, probably shot in one day on set.
It may sound like I hated this movie and, truth is, I did.
With a nearly two-and-a-half hour runtime, the movie seems to jump from cool concept art idea (“a diner in a jungle!” or “a music festival!”) to a cool fight scene idea (“a lasso lightsaber!” or “two evil robot dogs named Benny and Jet!”) With glaringly bad CGI, using increasingly famous cast members (Halle Berry? Elton John?) as a crutch for a hackneyed script, and countless, tired James Bond tropes thrown on the screen, Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a perfectly acceptable sequel to Spy Kids 3D.
Rating:
