The 2014 action comedy Kingsman: The Secret Service’ had been a hit with its smooth kicks and dapper agents that you could easily relate to the James Bond sagas and comic books. The movie had all elements: from action to humour and plenty of one-liners that together made for a spectacular combo. It had ended on a nail-biting note. leaving the audience wanting for more.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle 2 continues the story of the highly intelligent secret service agency, and is an accumulation of larger than life sets, Mathhew Vaughn’s dazzling action scenes, immaculately dressed agents, cool gadgets and lots of AI.
The ‘Kingsmen’ find themselves in a grave problem simply because ‘Poppy Adams’ (Julianne Moore) loses her mind. The villain ‘Poppy’ owns the world’s largest drug cartel and has billions in cash, but lacks the fame. Out of desperation, she comes up with an ingenious plan at the cost of millions of lives. The Kingsmen arrive at Kentucky to find out exactly what is going on where they meet the Statesmen, known as their cousin founded on the same day. The dynamic duo takes it from there to save the world and also Eggsy’s girlfriend, Princess Tilde (Hanna Alstrom).
Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton) is back doing the usual and his team supports him immensely. Then enters ‘Poppy’(Julianne Moore) doing her super smiley bad guy routine while wearing a pretty dress and an apron. She’s squeaky-clean and maternal but grinds people into burgers and makes delicious hamburgers if they don’t pay heed to her instructions. Then the Statesmen, cousins to Kingsmen make their entry. They are like the Kingsmen minus the suits and are permanently drunk–you barely understand a word that comes out of Agent Tequila (Channing Tatum)’s mouth.
Take all the bad from every single James Bond movie, throw in some celebrity cameos, an unacceptable number of robots and the word ‘bruv’ every now and again and you have Kingsman The Golden Circle. It’s not totally without its moments, not every over the top fight scene is boring that’s for sure. Agent Whiskey (Pedro Pascal) slicing and dicing anyone he encounters using his electric lasso is not something you see every day. If you manage to ignore the storyline, you might start to enjoy the different parts, particularly towards the latter half of the film. But honestly, for me, there was simply too much Elton John and robot dogs, although it did gather some chuckles.
The sequel is very much a sequel incorporating the same slightly crazy, comically evil villain from the original, a half man-half cyborg sidekick, a man-made epidemic and lots of smart gadgets. Here Julianne Moore’s way of inducing havoc isn’t that spectacular as opposed to her performance in the movie. She is a lunatic, yes, but she plays the madness gleefully and as someone who hasn’t snapped from lunacy but teetering right on the edge.
Between all the numbing spy spectacle, she comes as the scene-munching evil villain anchoring all the churn of activities.
The movie is also a tad bit long and while Moore is the one devising her malicious plans, eventually a few of the characters also change their colours and a few others succumb to the situation.
All in all, the movie is worth a watch.
