One of the biggest surprises at the 2015 box office was just how good Kingsman: The Secret Service was. Sure, it was directed by Matthew Vaugh — already lauded as one of this generation’s best action directors — and written by Jane Goldman — who had previous teamed-up with Vaughn to pen the scripts for Kickass, X-Men: First Class and Stardust — but that was all that the movie seemingly had going for it ahead of release.
It was released in the cinematic dead zone of February, opposite of Fifty Shades of Grey, which it was clearly counter-programming against. Its lead was some British kid that nobody had ever heard of before, whose character had been trained Mr. Miyagi-style by Colin Firth, an actor known almost exclusively for serious dramas like The King’s Speech and Pride and Prejudice: not big-budget action-comedies. Samuel L. Jackson was affecting some sort of weird lisp while doing his best Steve Jobs impersonation and his main henchwoman was missing a leg.
And that’s where it had everybody fooled. Colin Firth’s turn as an action star was just as exceptional as Liam Neeson’s when he starred in the first Taken: using his proven skill as an A-list thespian to deftly balance his role in over-the-top action set pieces with sly, deadpan humor. Egerton’s Eggsy Unwin proved to be a star-making turn for the young man, capably handling himself as the center-point of the film’s narrative while bouncing off far more experienced men with the same brashness as his character.
Although initially off-putting, everything about Samuel L. Jackson’s bizarre Silcon Valley pastiche as the film’s chief antagonist worked, proving to be just as funny as he was thoroughly menacing. And his right-hand woman, Gazelle, was a visually inventive, on-the-ground villain for Eggsy & Co. to square off against: completely owning some of the most fun action scenes in the entire film.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle was never going to measure up to the standard set by the original. I mean, how could it? The first film’s larger narrative of well-intentioned mass murder was perfectly grounded in (and, at times, mirrored by) Eggsy’s personal “boy becomes a man” and “snobs vs slobs” story arc. Half of the excitement of the movie came from just how unexpected any of it was: from the inspired casting to the inventive action beats to how perfectly they managed to weaponize the iconography of British gentlemanliness; they had already tipped their hat to that in the first movie, and we knew what we were in for the second time around.
And then, of course, there was the film’s most iconic scene: the sanguine slaughter of Westbero Baptist stand-ins by Firth’s Agent Galahad immediately before his unceremonious execution. The at-times first person brawl was a revelation in on-screen violence: relishing in every shot, punch, stab and kill in the extensive beat-down, dizzyingly set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” There was no way that any follow-up to this movie could have possibly topped the satisfying crunch of all those bigoted bones snapping with gloriously reckless abandon.
That’s not to say that Kingsman as a franchise is a one-trick pony. There’s plenty of life left in this series and a lot of fun avenues to explore (both in the latest and in future films). The addition of the Kingsman’s American counterparts, the Statesman — who weaponize Americana with the same self-aware zeal as their cousins across the pond — and its gauche mirror in villainess Poppy Adams’ 1950’s-styled lair set within an undiscovered Cambodian temple, was a brilliant take on the existing status-quo from the first movie.
Putting Eggsy (now Agent Galahad in his own right) in a committed relationship while still having to seduce persons of interest in order to extract vital information put a novel (if emphatically more uncomfortable) spin on the spy genre. Pairing the Kingsman with foreign agents was a fun source of both action and comedy, and forcing them to deal directly with some of the fallout from The Secret Service — namely a posh rival Kingsman trainee cum traitor who was a constant source of torment for the future Galahad — was refreshing at a time when every new sequel seems to forget what happened in the previous movie.
But while The Golden Circle starts to take the franchise in a novel direction, too much of its run-time is committed to reliving the greatest hits from the first movie. Firth’s Agent Galahad returns from the grave when its revealed that the Statesman rushed in with just enough time to save his life (but not his memories) after his supposed death in the first movie. This leads to a series of tangential callbacks to the first movie: including, but not limited to, the underwater training scene, the “manners maketh man” barfights, Mr. Pickles and Eggsy rescuing the Swedish princess (or, in this case, Elton John).
While a number of scenes and concepts seem like they would have benefited from another go-around in the writers’ room, Galahad’s revival is the root cause of the majority of The Golden Circle‘s problems. It cheapens the emotional payoff from his sacrifice in the first movie, derails the development of Eggsy’s and Merlin’s deepening bond (as the two surviving Kingsman from the first movie) and really does nothing to progress the plot forward.
The other major letdown this time around is the last-minute betrayal of the Statesman’s Agent Whiskey right when the two Galahads need to input a code and save the world. The film’s actual villain has already been killed off by this point and we’ve already seen Whiskey in action earlier in the movie, so the resulting fight, while it does afford a few extra minutes of fist-pumping fun before the film plot starts winding down, gives us nothing that we haven’t seen before and serves no real purpose in its own right.
If you want a good action movie now that the summer glut has passed in full, you could hardly do better than The Golden Circle (at least until Blade Runner 2049 hits theaters next week). If all you want is more Kingman action, this will scratch that itch well enough. The Golden Circle is a fine action movie that puns a fun twist on both its nascent franchise and the genre it belongs to. Just make the mistake of thinking that this follow-up comes anywhere near the quality of the first movie.
Rating: 3/5
Buy on BluRay: If you enjoyed the first movie.
Follow Us
