If you gave a teenage boy at the peak of hormonal disruption a film crew and a $100 million budget, he'd make a Kingsman movie. Not the original perhaps, which exploded onto the scene in 2014 and seriously super-charged a flagging genre. But a rehash of video-game action sequences, headshots, and dirty-jokes... that's more fitting for a pubescent lad with anger issues than a serious director like Matthew Vaughan.
Sadly, as you may have guessed, the above is a pretty fair description of Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the second instalment of the British, and now transatlantic, spy franchise. Where the first film – while hugely problematic for viewers with any sort of strong moral code – was dazzlingly different from anything that had gone before it, the sequel simply offers more of the same, and absolutely nothing more. That might be acceptable if you're making an Ice Age movie, but my hunch is that comic book fans who've enjoyed such frequent innovation in say, the Marvel film universe, will be more than a little disappointed by this lazy second chapter.
The charismatic Taron Egerton reprises his role as Eggsy, the estate kid-turned super spy thanks to his mentoring relationship with Colin Firth's Galahad. Firth is unequivocally murdered in the first Kingsman, so the fact that he's apparently been resurrected for the second is at first intriguing – until the film again asks you to suspend belief way beyond plausibility. In fact one of the biggest problems with the movie is the frequent leaps it demands you get on board with – by the end it hasn't just jumped the shark, but pole vaulted over an entire Sea Life Centre.
Maybe fans would argue that's the point of a Kingsman movie, but there are rules to good storytelling that you break at your peril. By injecting adrenaline into every element of the movie, it just becomes an empty rollercoaster: we're not taken along for the ride. The story, which zooms between scenes that look like action figure playsets, follows Julianne Moore's devilish drug queen attempting to hold the world to ransom over legalisation by poisoning millions of people all at once, but it's all so far-fetched that we struggle to really care.
You won't be surprised to hear that the film is fairly bereft of real themes. The death and resurrection metaphor is wasted, as are several potentially interesting characters, while the relationship between Eggsy and Galahad feels like a missed opportunity for some much-needed depth. In principle they're a fascinating rabbi and disciple, one learning a strict 'code' from the other, but in practice they just shoot people together. That sums the film up in a nutshell.
That's not to say the film is totally without merit. There are some good gags in there, and the creative inclusion of Elton John (yes, you read that right) as a pivotal character is the movie's undoubted highlight. There's also a brave and utterly unashamed attack on President Trump, which works as a surprisingly relevant piece of satire. Ultimately though, these little flourishes can't hide the laziness of a second helping that's just more of the same. Occasionally grubby (Poppy Delevingne, as a brief love interest, is used to particularly unpleasant effect), and frequently gruesome for no good reason, it might be a teenage boy's dream of a movie, but for the rest of us, it feels like Kingsman just gave up its crown.
Martin Saunders is a Contributing Editor for Christian Today and the Deputy CEO of Youthscape. Follow him on Twitter @martinsaunders.
