Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2107, R)

For my money, not quite as good as the first film but still a ton of fun.  It was great to get back to the old Kingsman gang and see some new characters joining the mix as well.  Even if the returns diminish slightly, I’m all in for seeing whatever else this team has to throw at me (personally, I think it looks poised for a trilogy, and I’d be cool with that.)

When a Big Bad targets Kingsman in a pretty devastating way, Eggsy and Merlin look across the pond for help from their heretofore-unknown American “cousins”:  Statesman, a similarly-audacious intelligence agency with crazy spy gear and killer moves, opting for a Southern gent aesthetic rather than the posh thing Kingsman has going on.  Using Kingsman’s knowledge and Statesman’s resources, the two agencies have to work together to stop a diabolical plot from a villain who’s both insanely ludicrous and genuinely despicable.

I love seeing Eggsy again, how he’s grown as both an agent and a person (side note:  I appreciate that Princess Tilde from the first movie wasn’t just a typical James Bond-style conquest and reappears in this film as Eggsy’s serious girlfriend.  It’s a nice way to play against the stereotype.)  He and Merlin make a good team, and the addition of the Americans gives the actions scenes a fun dynamic.  In particular, I love Agent Whiskey’s mad lasso and bullwhip skills, but Eggsy seriously brings it on the badass-spy front, too.  If you’ve seen the trailers, it’s not a surprise that Colin Firth is back as Harry.  I won’t spoil the details of his return, but the scenes between him and Eggsy carry a lot of weight and add a good deal to the story.

Speaking of the story, the villain plot offers up some deceptively-smart themes for such an outlandish movie.  In between the death-by-meat-grinder moments, killer robot dogs, and Elton John cameos, the film has some interesting things to say about the war on drugs and its toll in human lives.  Poppy, the new villain, has a lot in common with Valentine from the first film – ridiculously kooky but absolutely ruthless and highly effective – although she has enough of her own thing going on that she never feels like a retread.

I know I said I didn’t like it quite as well as the first film and then listed a bunch of good things about it, which doesn’t strictly make sense.  But it’s hard to put my finger on exactly why it works a little less.  It has plenty of great stuff going for it, but for me, all the moving parts are just shy of adding up.  It’s just in little things here and there – a moment that doesn’t go quite far enough, another that’s a bit too much.  A lot of it, I’m sure, is just how out-there the first Kingsman was when I saw it two years ago.  There’s a slight sense of the new film getting up to the same old tricks to an extent, and even though that’s a good thing (don’t fix what isn’t broke,) it doesn’t quite capture the irreverent freshness of its predecessor.

The acting is still awesome.  The returning cast members, like Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, and Mark Strong, all do a bang-up job, and the new actors on the Statesman side lean strongly into the Americana cowboy angle without it getting too hokey.  I was surprised at how little Channing Tatum’s Agent Tequila is in the movie, but Jeff Bridges’s Champ, Halle Berry’s Ginger, and Pedro Pascal’s Agent Whiskey (Oberyn from Game of Thones!) hold up their end quite handily.  Meanwhile, as Poppy, Julianne Moore looks to be having a great time taking enormous bites out of the scenery.

Warnings

Lots of the old ultraviolence, sexual content, drinking/drug use, swearing, and thematic elements.

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