Review #1,285: 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle' (2017)

Having directed no fewer than three comic-book adaptations with Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class and Kingsman: The Secret Service, it's a wonder director Matthew Vaughn has taken so long to deliver a sequel. Kingsman took over 400 million at the box-office and was one of the surprise successes of 2014, and with critical and audience responses both overwhelmingly positive for the My Fair Lady-meets-James Bond spy comedy, a sequel was always going to be on the cards. With The Golden Circle, Vaughn and returning screenwriter Jane Goldman have taken the route of most sequels and made everything bigger, but not necessarily better. The Golden Circle may please some fans of the original with its lashings of ultra-violence and colourful language, but I suspect many will become sickly with the film's desire to throw everything at the screen to see what sticks.

A year on from preventing Samuel L. Jackson's plan to wipe out the majority of the world's population using mania-inducing SIM cards, and Eggsy (Taron Egerton) has settled well within the ranks of the Kingsman and has shacked up with Princess Tilde of Sweden (Hanna Alstrom). One night he is attacked by a former foe he had long thought dead: Charlie Hesketh (Edward Holcroft), the failed Kingsman applicant believed to have perished in the head-exploding finale of the previous film. Charlie is alive and well, and has been fitted with a hi-tech bionic arm capable of brute strength. Eggsy manages to overcome Charlie, but the severed arm hacks its way into the Kingsman's computer system. Soon enough, the majority of Britain's finest secret service has been taken out by long-range missiles. Along with Merlin (Mark Strong), Eggsy travels to the U.S. to investigate a clue left in the agency's Doomsday protocol, and discover a sister agency named the Statesman led by the gruff Champagne (Jeff Daniels).

The Statesman are like the Kingsman, only instead of bespoke suits and good table manners, they dress like cowboys and have nicknames based on alcoholic beverages. Channing Tatum's Tequila is first to greet them, and is understandably suspicious of this shadowy agency operating without their knowledge. There's also Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), and Merlin-equivalent tech genius Ginger Ale (Halle Berry). The bad guy this time around is Poppy (Julianne Moore), a Martha Stewart-like drug baron hiding out in Cambodia. Her master plan is to infect all users of her various drugs with a toxin that will soon cause their deaths unless the U.S. President puts an end to the War on Drugs. Poppy's outlandish plan, which would seem to damage Poppy's trade if successful or offer the President a chance to rid the world of drug abusers and Poppy's customers, is one of many problems with The Golden Circle. Armed with robot dogs and a kidnapped Elton John in an appearance that goes way beyond mere cameo, Vaughn and Goldman seem happy to suck out all sense of reality for this sequel, and with it have considerably lowered the stakes.

The movie's most glaring problem, however, is the return of Colin Firth's Harry Hart. Most of us were shocked and saddened when he received a bullet to the face from Samuel L. Jackson following the original's most spectacular scene, but to bring him back feels cheap, removing any sense of peril in the process. The action scenes, which involve everything from an electric whip to a man-chomping meat-grinder, rely heavily on CGI. The Secret Service did this too, but it also used practical effects to retain a sense of physicality when Harry was hacking, shooting and burning his way through a Church full of bigoted psychopaths. The newcomers all do well despite being left in the background for the majority of the running-time, with Tatum especially barely registering before he is placed into a coma. Highlights include Egerton's beautiful jaw-line and Strong's deadpan Merlin, but there is little resembling the freshness of the first film, which also managed to keep its outrageous ambitions in check by structuring the plot around Eggsy's Kingsman training. The Golden Circle is by no means the disaster many critics have cited, but by striding to take things to the next level, Vaughn has made Kingsman both cringe-inducingly silly and plain boring.


Directed by: Matthew Vaughn
Starring: Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Mark Strong, Pedro Pascal, Halle Berry, Elton John, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges
Country: UK/USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #974: 'Legend' (2015)

Peter Medak's 1990 film The Krays, starring Gary and Martin Kemp from Spandau Ballet as the titular London geezers, was decent, anchoring the twins' narrative on their overbearing mother, played ferociously by Billie Whitelaw. But seeing the film now, over two decades later, its synth-heavy score makes it feel dated and presses the need for a modern re-telling. Director Brian Helgeland bagged one of the most charismatic actors on the planet to play not one, but both of the twins for his update, and when the trailer first emerged on the internet for Legend, it felt like we were finally getting the definitive story of two of the most notorious gangsters in British history. So how on Earth did Legend turn out so mind-numbingly terrible?

In the early scenes we are carried along on a wave of genre cliches, from the spontaneous date proposal from the charming bad boy to the curious girl who should really know better, to a Steadicam shot of a swinging nightclub interior as the girl drinks this glamorous new world in without questioning how such luxury was achieved. It works like a students version of Goodfellas (1990), only without the originality, style or sparkling dialogue. The girl is Frances, or Frankie, and her new fella just happens to be Reggie Kray (Tom Hardy), former boxer-turned-criminal kingpin who, along with his twin Ronnie (also Hardy), are well on their path to ruling London with an iron fist. However, Legend seems more invested in the relationship between Reggie and Frankie than any of the twins' brutal schemes, and Emily Browning fails to inject any life into a thanklessly written role.

One of many of the film's baffling decisions is to have Frankie provide the voice-over, forcing her to deliver such lines as "a cup of tea can solve anything," with semi-conviction. Helgeland's script for L.A. Confidential won an Oscar in 1997, but Legend's dialogue makes the dullest of ITV dramas sound like Shakespeare spoken by Alan Rickman (R.I.P.). Yet this could be forgiven had the on-screen action possess an ounce of narrative coherency. Instead, Helgeland portrays the ups-and-downs of Reggie and Frankie's rocky marriage, dipping in and out of the Krays criminal activities whenever it seems to want to show us someone getting punched or shouted at in a style not to dissimilar to the work of Guy Ritchie.

Hardy tries his best, but his two characters have been written so cartoon-like that it's difficult take them seriously. Reggie is the brain who hides his violent urges, and Ronnie is the unhinged muscle who has no desire to disguise his brutal tendencies, seemingly revelling in telling other gangsters of his preference to boys. Ronnie is certainly the most interesting of the twins, but he gets a surprising lack of screen-time. His scenes with his more successful and handsome brother provide the stand-out moments, namely a bar fight that sees Hardy fight Hardy, but the complexity of their rocky relationship is only glimpsed and barely explored. Small roles for the likes of David Thewlis, Christopher Eccleston, Sam Spruell, John Sessions, Paul Bettany and Taron Egerton are highlights - Egerton, as 'Mad' Teddy Smith, in particular - but this is small praise for a film that simply left me bored and unenlightened.


Directed by: Brian Helgeland
Starring: Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, Christopher Eccleston, Taron Egerton, David Thewlis, Sam Spruell, Chazz Palminteri
Country: UK/France/USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #886: 'Kingsman: The Secret Service' (2014)

Manners. Maketh. Man. So says the dapperly-dressed secret agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth), right before he bars all exits and proceeds to glass, stab and maim an assortment of goons in that most British of locales, the pub. Kingsman, the latest film from Layer Cake (2004) and X-Men: First Class (2011) director Matthew Vaughn, and his second collaboration with comic-book writer Mark Millar (after 2010's Kick-Ass), is both completely preposterous and ridiculously entertaining, simultaneously mocking and paying homage to the traditional idea of Britishness in an ever-changing society, and no doubt infuriating many a Daily Mail reader in the process.

Harry Hart, a Harry Palmer-like gent, is a Kingsman; a highly secretive and unaligned ring of spies and agents who dress sharply and certainly know their manners. After an operation to rescue Professor Arnold (Mark Hamill) from a possible kidnapping plot sees one Kingsman agent disposed of in a particularly gruesome fashion, Harry is tasked with finding a replacement to fill the spot. The son of a former agent who saved Harry's life years previously, Eggsy (Taron Egerton), is now growing up in a council flat with his layabout mother and abusive stepfather. After a joyride lands him in the police station, Eggsy calls the number on the back of a Kingsman medal given to him by Harry when he was a child, and he is bailed.

Harry enters Eggsy into the trials to become a Kingsman agent along with a bunch of upper-class toffs who refer to Eggsy as a 'pleb'. The group of youngsters must perform a series of tasks under the watchful eye of Merlin (Mark Strong), involving escaping from a flooded room and shooting a dog in the head. Meanwhile, Harry investigates links from recent strange events to internet billionaire Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), a flamboyant man with a lisp and a fondness for wearing caps indoors. whose upcoming deal to offer SIM cards with free calls and internet to everybody for free reeks of conspiracy and may be related to an incident involving an exploding head.

When Harry and Valentine have their inevitable face-to-face sit-down moment, the two munch on Big Macs at Valentine's hideously decorated mansion while discussing the joys of the ludicrous Bond movies of old, when things weren't taken so seriously. Kingsman is an obvious Bond pastiche, with deadly gadgets, a henchman wielding an unconventional weapon (in this case - knives for feet), and an outrageous villain. It even comes as a surprise when Firth fails to raise an eyebrow while delivering a double entendre. It shows that these kinds of movies can still be fun without the shadow of uber-seriousness seen in the Daniel Craig Bond's and the recent Bourne movies lurking overhead, while telling the people who will be inevitably offended by the spurts of shocking violence to get a grip and remember that it's only a movie.

However, it did little to prepare me for the movie's key set-piece, which involves a church in Kentucky inhabited by a group of bigoted, right-wing religious types - and Harry - indulge in what can only be described as a pub-brawl massacre. I have never witnessed a scene that would usually be portrayed as a tragedy executed with such glee, with Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird blaring out while men and women are stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, set on fire and, in one particularly grisly moment, get slammed into a wall so hard it snaps their spine in two. It seems to go on and on, but it's an absolutely thrilling moment stocked full of cartoon violence, and will no doubt making some viewers expecting a light and funny experience wholly uncomfortable in the process.

It's sadly not all great. Eggsy's recruitment and training is formulaic and none of the tasks are particularly original or clever. This period of the film also keeps Eggsy and Harry apart for most of it, when their few scenes crackle with chemistry. But ultimately, Kingsman is an intriguing experience. bending to generic tropes while seemingly playing by its own rules. Firth displays a comedic willingness rarely seen and Egerton, who has popped up from nowhere, is a real find as the swaggering Eggsy, a baseball-cap wearing yoof who calls people 'bruv', who in most actors hands would have come across as extremely annoying. Kingsman dabbles in enough extreme violence to cause most viewers to question what they really enjoy seeing on screen, and it's a throwback with a modern twist, celebrating the days when movies could be fun, inexplicable and inconsequential, Just don't watch it with your nan.


Directed by: Matthew Vaughn
Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Strong, Sofia Boutella, Michael Caine
Country: UK

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie