I fucking love these movies. The first Kingsman is one of my favorite movies of the past five years and (along with John Wick) one of the best action movies of the century so far. The mix of a James Bond-like world with extreme violence and raunchy humor is something that could easily delve too far into the realm of parody, but director Matthew Vaughn has managed to balance those elements damn near perfectly. While I don’t think that Kingsman: The Golden Circle quite matches the insanity of the original, it is a more than worthy sequel.
The film again follows Eggsy, now a full-fledged Kingsman, as he must thwart a super-villain-ish plot by the head of an international drug cartel (played by Julianne Moore in an almost cartoonishly insane performance). He must also deal with the near annihilation of the Kingsmen and team up with their U.S. counterparts, logically called the Statesmen, to save the day. Much like the original, shit goes in some weird directions and I’ll just leave the plot summary at that.
Also much like the original, the entertainment value here comes from the balance of violence and humor. There have been hundreds of spy movies, but it is the tone that sets these films apart; it’s rare for films with this high of a body count to be laugh-out-loud funny. But the movie is also strangely grounded in a way thanks to the strength of the performances. The characters in this are so fun that the audience genuinely roots for them and it is actually sad when they get killed in various over-the-top ways (though I was very glad to see Colin Firth back as Harry, despite the gun shot that he took to the eye in the previous film). I also preferred Julianne Moore’s villain here to Samuel L. Jackson’s character in the first film. While Jackson’s character was entertaining and served as a solid satire of James Bond villains, Moore is wearing her craziest pair of crazy pants in this film. She is one of the most unique villains that I have seen on the big screen in a long time and the performance does a great balancing act between scary and frigging ridiculous.
The action scenes in this don’t quite reach the heights of the original. If the first movie was dialed to 11, this brings it back to about an 8. But the major action set pieces are still highly entertaining and heightened by whoever the genius is that picks the soundtrack for these movies (this time around, we get absurd violence set to Prince and Elton John tunes). I did have issues with the editing in a couple of the scenes, as it includes some more quick-cut editing than the original and I hate that style. But it never approaches Jason Bourne levels of headache-inducing bullshit and you can’t go wrong with a robot waitress launching grenades at Colin Firth.
There is a celebrity in this movie that was amazingly never mentioned in the marketing, but I have to mention it here as a spoiler (skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know)…………. Elton goddamn John is in this and he’s fucking awesome. I knew that he was in the movie going into it, but I thought he would have a brief cameo as an elder Kingsman or something. Nope. He plays himself, as the cartel kidnapped him to perform for them. If you have “see Elton John kick the shit out of people while shouting profanities and wearing a chicken suit” on your bucket list, then look no further than this movie. That is also a fucking specific bucket list that you have there.
I have a few minor gripes that make this a bit inferior to the original. As mentioned, the fight editing gets overly-frantic at times and the action scenes are not as memorable as those in the first Kingsman. Nothing in this comes close to the absurdity of the church massacre scene in the original (I’m still amazed the movie didn’t get an NC-17 for that scene alone). The sight of Julianne Moore putting a man in a huge meat grinder to make a hamburger out of him comes close, though. Also, at 2 hours and 21 minutes, it is a bit too long. I have heard that the original cut was almost 4 hours and the studio considering splitting it into two films (like Kill Bill), and I don’t know what else could have been crammed into this movie. It never outstays its welcome, but it would have benefitted from losing about 20 more minutes.
I highly recommend this and you should definitely check out the original if you haven’t seen it yet. I consider this and John Wick to be the best action series currently going right now and one of the few recent occasions that the prospect of a long series doesn’t have me cursing the existence of film.
Just a sidenote: After Logan Lucky, this is the second movie I’ve seen in the last month or so that features Channing Tatum and has characters singing John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” as part of a major dramatic scene. I don’t really have any commentary on that other than that it’s an oddly specific thing to see twice in a month.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsman:_The_Golden_Circle#/media/File:Kingsman_The_Golden_Circle.png
