Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
When an attack on the Kingsman headquarters takes place and a new villain rises, Eggsy and Merlin are forced to work together with the American agency known as the Statesman to save the world.
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27 films that influenced Kingsman: The Golden Circle
What critics say influenced Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Thus here is a bigger and sillier movie, albeit one not nearly as clean and well-structured as 2015’s My Fair Lady by way of axe-wielding superspies.
It was a spy version of My Fair Lady, and it worked, because in it’s world building of an original action series, it was also a tongue in cheek parody of the James Bond franchise, to the degree of creating brand excitement for young people in it’s audience to consider the purchase of sharp, tailored suite carried by the Mr. Porter brand in the same way Bond timelessly sports a Timex watch and drives an Aston Martin.
2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service has a fairly succinct premise: an ultra-violent, laddish James Bond crossed with My Fair Lady, from Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn.
While not shy on carnage, the earlier “Kingsman” focused on Eggsy’s transformation from a streetwise hood into a dapper young super-spy — basically, the movie was “My Fair Lady” meets James Bond, as Eggsy learned to dress smart, talk properly and save the world, taking his shirt off just often enough to remind what the movie was really selling.
If the first film drew its magic from a “My Fair Lady”-like attempt by Firth to prove breeding doesn’t determine gallantness, the sequel lacks a central idea.
At the end of the first film, he’d gone through his My Fair Lady-riffing transformation to become a fully-fledged member of the titular secret service operation; this one drops us, Bond-style, into the midst of a big set piece involving a former rival and a ludicrously violent and over-the-top punch-up in the back of a speeding cab.
Despite its similarly frenzied cloak-and-dagger-on-crack shenanigans, including a ski-retreat escapade that all but bashes a DVD of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” over the viewer’s head, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” clearly means to be a less anarchic, more emotionally attuned experience than its predecessor.
Then there's what seems like a pointless trip to a spectacular Italian mountaintop ski station that at first smacks of a homage to On Her Majesty's Secret Service but then turns out to hold the potential solution to the world's great dilemma.
The movie mixes a horror film virus premise with a goofy James Bond parody right down to mimicking the snowy battles of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" accompanied by the best 007 score never used in a Bond adventure.
Playing it straight — as the Bond films and its cousin Mission: Impossible do — rarely works.
The best James Bond films look positively ancient by comparison, and even relative spy newbies like Jason Bourne and “Mission: Impossible” hero Ethan Hunt show the age of their source material when viewed through, ahem, “Kingsman” lenses.
The villain of the film, Julianne Moore as Poppy, is an equally enjoyable weirdo antagonist as Samuel L. Jackson’s Valentine, even though her ultimate plan of world annihilation is one of the most half-baked spy film scheme since Christopher Walken played Zorin in A View to a Kill.
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And all in an atmosphere of adolescent smuttiness that would get one of the movies the title "Octopussy."
Director Matthew Vaughn’s decision to cast Colin Firth as a sort of dapper, dangerous fusion of Patrick Macnee in The Avengers and Wolverine at his most kill-crazy was the sort of eccentric, esoteric touch that distinguished it from its Hollywood competition and helped make it a huge box-office hit.
Berry fares a little better as a tech expert who dreams of becoming a field agent, but that concept worked a lot better as the premise of Spy.
Halle Berry’s character, Ginger Ale, probably comes out the best, but she also spends most of the movie sitting behind a desk, telling people what to do, like Melissa McCarthy at the beginning of Spy.
Poppy grew up in the 1970s and she loved the nostalgia craze for the 1950s as popularized in movies such as “American Graffiti” and TV shows such as “Happy Days,” so her compound includes an old-fashioned diner and a retro movie theater, and her henchmen wear letterman’s jackets.
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If you like this, try: the first “Kingsman” movie and “Our Man Flint”…
It played with conventions, but not in a cheesy sight gag sort of way (think Austin Powers).
Without getting into details, it may be the dumbest plan by an evil villain since the last “Austin Powers” movie.