James who? While 007 has been on extended annual leave as a result of Daniel Craig’s cold feet, Taron Egerton’s thoroughly less urbane secret agent Eggsy Unwin has managed to thoroughly outdo him, with Matthew Vaughn’s sequel to his hit 2015 comedy-thriller doubling down on the qualities that marked its predecessor out from the superspy pack: more star-filled, more gleefully grisly, and reaching new heights of skyscraping silliness.
It’s a film so cartoonishly outsized that it almost renders the first film restrained by comparison. Whether that’s a good thing depends on the viewer’s tolerance for death-defying feats of illogicality, or action scenes that stretch to gargantuan lengths. Indeed, Kingsman’s two-hour 20-minute running time could have been shaved by around a fifth, without losing a great deal. But, crucially, the visual wit that made the original feel so bracingly fresh is maintained, not to mention its fondness for turning the Savile Row air blue – if you’ve ever hoped to witness Elton John spitting out four-letter words like a Gatling gun, all while wearing a remarkable feathered suit, then this might be the gonzo spy caper for you.
A manic opening fight scene in a black cab, between Eggsy and his old finishing-school nemesis Charlie, ups the ante immediately, a flurry of kicks, jabs and gravity-upending camerawork. Charlie, now menacingly equipped with a bionic arm, is these days in the service of new pantomime big bad, Poppy Adams, played with lysergic glee by Julianne Moore. As the soccer mom-ish leader of nefarious crime cartel the Golden Circle, Poppy rules over the entire global drug trade, which she controls from a jungle lair curiously kitted out as a kitsch 50s utopia, featuring gleaming bowling alleys, diners and nail salons, but also, somewhat confusingly, robot dogs and a captive Elton John.
If there were any doubts about Poppy’s malicious intentions, they’re quickly dismissed as she engineers an unhappy meeting between a henchman and a meat grinder, one of several gruesome scenes that comfortably earns The Golden Circle its grown-up rating. Poppy’s grand plan is equally nefarious: she has spiked the entire planetary supply of narcotics with a toxin that causes the user’s veins to turn blue and will ultimately kill them. There’s an antidote, of course, but Poppy will only release it if the world’s leaders legalise all drugs and in the process hand her an extremely lucrative monopoly to rule over.
To allow her plan to go forward without a hitch, Poppy carries out a pre-emptive strike on the Kingsman, wiping out a large chunk of its network of superspies, and forcing Eggsy and Merlin (Mark Strong) to seek refuge at the home of their US equivalent, the Statesmen, a ragtag bunch of whiskey-hawking American agents who have seemingly been introduced for the sole reason of cramming in a handful of available A-listers: Jeff Bridges, Narcos’s Pedro Pascal, Halle Berry and a somewhat underused Channing Tatum.
It represents a dramatic turnover of cast members from the fairly compact ensemble in the first film and, for much of The Golden Circle’s first hour, there’s a slight absence of the crackling character dynamics that provided some flickers of realism amid the preposterous whizz-bangery. Most sorely missed is the relationship between Eggsy and Colin Firth’s delightfully avuncular mentor figure Harry Hart, who was offed, seemingly definitively with a bullet to the brain towards its end.
Of course, if you’ve glimpsed even the slightest bit of the promotional material for this sequel you’ll know that Harry’s demise wasn’t as permanent as first assumed – Firth even appeared on the red carpet for The Golden Circle’s premiere. Let’s not give away the circumstances of his return but suffice to say they’re in keeping with the rest of The Golden Circle, a film where the ludicrous is routine and notions of threat or danger are entirely absent. The extended, limb-cracking fight scenes feel even more procedural than last time around, a procession of impressively choreographed moves that are there to be admired rather than to chew your fingernails to – though, to be fair, most feature at least one visual flourish (such as Eggsy flat-packing his briefcase into bullet-repelling armour) that elicit gasps at its audacity.
And that’s The Golden Circle in a nutshell. Every crass or tone-deaf moment – including a sexual encounter between Eggsy and a socialite, played by Poppy Delevingne, that at best feels entirely misjudged and at worst a complete betrayal of Eggsy’s cheeky but ultimately quite sweet character – is matched by a wonderfully droll one-liner or nugget of razor-sharp satire. (There’s a delicious nastiness to the idea that a mass poisoning of the world’s narcotics would be embraced by the US president because it allows him to let his country’s users die and thus win the “war on drugs”.) It’s a film that is utterly maximalist, stuffed to the gills with gadgets, gimmicks, ideas both good and bad. An exhausting, exhilarating watch.
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