KINGSMEN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE - **/*****

By Kal Vilmer

"Setting your first action set piece to, "Let's Go Crazy" by Prince. Nice try."

    Let me start off by saying I will be spoiling the shit out of this movie. Kingsmen: The Golden Circle is the follow-up to 2014's pleasant surprise Kingsmen: The Secret service, and is once again written and directed by Matthew Vaughn. The Golden Circle continues the exploits of Taron Egerton's Eggsy - no last name given - who is now a full fledged member the Kingsmen as he begins yet another journey to save the world. Where to begin... The Golden Circle does everything a sequel should do, but somehow gets it all wrong. The film relies on a lot of call backs to the first and decides to take the route of bigger rather than better when it comes to the story, action, and characters; killing off almost all the remaining characters from the first film and replacing them with high profile actors Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry, and Channing Tatum, who in the end take a backseat for most of the movie. That is with the exception of Pedro Pascal, who when introduced as Statesman agent Whisky, had the crowd quite excited, but had me shrugging my shoulders. Julianne Moore, as Poppy, the leader of a drug cartel and central antagonist of the film, was the only addition that I thoroughly enjoyed. Her performance is by far the most fun the film has to offer, but falls short due to her ultimate goal being completely idiotic. In short, she is poisoning all of her customers in an attempt to get the President to legalize all drugs so she can become a legitimate business woman and become famous. Like I said, idiotic.

    The Golden Circle continues the same problems as the other adaption of Mark Millar's work, Kickass, with a strong first film and a complete let down for the follow up. The movie is chalk full of unforgivable CGI, and fight scenes that rely on sprawling camera movements swooping in and out of the fight, and no subtlety whatsoever. The reason cinematography like this worked in the first film was because it was used sparingly, primarily in a brawl in which Colin Firth's character Harry laid waste to an entire congregation of people at a church. Speaking of Colin Firth, his return was completely unnecessary and strips Eggsy of all character growth from the first film. If you are wondering how Harry makes his return, well the Statesmen have developed a cure for gunshot wounds to the head, go figure.

    Like the first film, this one does continue the hyper reality of including celebrity cameos. This time, instead of a slew of them, you get one, and they really want to make this one count. Where the first film had a hand full ranging from A to D list celebrity appearances working with the villain, in The Golden Circle you get Elton John. A lot of Elton John. The joke ran dry very quickly, and it does not help that he has the same amount of screen time as Channing Tatum, if not more. Looking back, the only good I can find in the movie, aside from Julianne Moore, is Bruce Greenwood as the President of the United States who is quite funny. Him and a human sized meat grinder, which is not only used once, but twice, and leads to someone being forced to eat a burger made of one of Poppy's henchmen. That was dope.

    I could go into far more detail about all of these points, but there is one more I want to address: The film has a strange underlying message that can be summed up as, "Don't do drugs, they are illegal, get drunk, it's legal." I was left a bit slack-jawed when this was made blatantly clear by Jeff Bridges' character, Champ, telling Tequila, played by Channing Tatum, "You better stick to alcohol." What? Considering the negative side effects and withdrawal of alcohol abuse in comparison to something like cannabis, this just left me baffled. If the movie was trying to make a point, it was lost on me.

    There is so much to hate about this movie - and I hope to get into it more at a later date - but to say I didn't have a bit of fun with it would be a lie. I'd say wait for HBO but let's be honest, this will probably end up on Starz. - 2 out of 5 stars.