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Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017; Directed by Matthew Vaughn)

There comes a particular moment in Matthew Vaughn’s deliriously left-field spy-action comic-book spectacular Kingsman: The Golden Circle in which Colin Firth (as dapper super-spy Harry Hart, codenamed Galahad) teams up with rock legend Sir Elton John (playing himself, because who else could?) in a retro-1950s bowling alley built by a drug cartel queenpin deep in Cambodian jungle. The two men – Firth in an impeccably tailored suit, Sir Elton in a typically flamboyant multichromatic feathered get-up – destroy a killer robot attack dog (Jet, who along with robo-sibling Bennie tips a hat to an Elton John hit song) by crushing its head between two bowling balls. To even begin to provide explanation and context for this beat scrambles one’s brain. How does it come to this? In what sort of movie does something like that happen?

The Golden Circle, the sequel to Vaughn’s non-trangressively transgressive 2015 action blockbuster Kingsman: The Secret Service, is the sort of movie where something like that happens. A ridiculous movie, that is to say. There is more wild and goofy shit in this movie than in a whole summer’s release slate of blockbusters. If big-budget Hollywood filmmaking is firmly set on its yellow brick road to total comic-book and geek culture immersion and the attendant total unmooring from the expression of lived experience that almost inevitably comes with that path, then it could certainly do worse than to lean into the aesthetic of cool-ass ludicrous frippery with even a fraction of the wacky, shiny, imaginative pop-surrealism that Vaughn sincerely chases in this movie.

The Golden Circle launches into this magnificent exhilarating nonsense literally in its opening moments. Walking out of the well-appointed Savile Row tailor’s shop that serves as a front for the exclusive and well-funded secret British private intelligence service that employs him as one of its best agents, Eggsy (Taron Egerton) comes face to face with Charlie Hesketh (Edward Holcroft), a failed former Kingsman recruit who resents Eggsy’s success with the service as well as his working-class roots. Armed with a gun and a bionic robot arm, Hesketh battles the athletic and well-trained superspy Eggsy in the latter’s luxe custom London taxicab, pursued by a fleet of machine-gun-equipped vehicles. Vaughn’s camera pushes in, twists, rotates, follows the action choreography moves with keen clarity and twitchy interest, like a high-tech bird following a tantalizing morsel of food. Like showcase action sequences such as Firth’s establishing pub fight and wild shootout in a church in The Secret Service and this film’s closing single-shot fight in a diner, this scene strongly marks Vaughn as an action filmmaker of distinction, wit, and intelligence amidst a glut of samey action setpieces in the blockbuster milieu.

Defeating Hesketh for the moment and exploding his cronies, Eggsy pivots to balancing his home life with his girlfriend Tilde (Hanna Alström), the Crown Princess of Sweden whom he saved from Samuel L. Jackson’s tech bro and criminal mastermind in the previous franchise installment, as well as socializing with his modest, normal council estate buddies (Tobias Bakare, Theo Barklem-Biggs, Thomas Turgoose, and Calvin Demba). But Hesketh, working for the aforementioned boss of the titular Golden Circle cartel, Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), conspires to deal Eggsy a grievous blow both personal and professional.

With the Kingsman organization reduced to only Eggsy and his technical expert Merlin (Mark Strong), the two men follow a bottle of Kentucky bourbon Stateside to a whiskey distillery run by Statesman, their richer and more cowboyesque American counterpart private intelligence firm. They meet a set of spirit-and-soda-codenamed agents: shotgun-wielding Tequila (Channing Tatum, prominent in the marketing but in little more than a cameo role here; Elton is in more scenes and serves a greater narrative purpose), bossman Champagne or “Champ” (Jeff Bridges, also only in a scene or three), electrified-whip-and-lasso-brandishing rustler Whiskey (Pedro Pascal, who has a larger and more vital role), and their version of deskbound techie Merlin, Ginger Ale (Halle Berry). Statesman also have in their care an amnesiac Harry Hart (Firth), believed dead by Eggsy after being headshot in the last movie. Harry is alive but not well, having forgotten his Kingsman training and experiences and reverted to the obsessive study of butterflies.

So Eggsy must bring Harry back to himself, navigate relations with Kingsman’s brash (and possibly secretly treacherous) Yankee mirror organization, avenge the lost, and balance the demands of his spy life with those of his Swedish royal girlfriend. The Golden Circle stretches some of its elements a bit too far, and all of them together certainly beyond wise limits; this movie is certainly too long. But the loopy ambition of its strangest and most extreme setpieces carries it through, and it’s hard to deny that Vaughn shows us things in The Golden Circle that we certainly haven’t seen before.

Lepidopterist Harry’s padded cell features half-sketched butterfly diagrams, and after his amnesia is cleared, butterflies still occasionally flutter through the vision of his Kingsman monitoring glasses. Eggsy has a crisis of romantic conscience (and indeed precipitates a second-act conflict with Tilde) when he must engineer an intimate encounter with Hesketh’s girlfriend Clara (Poppy Delevingne) in a VIP tent at the Glastonbury Festival; a tracking device must be inserted on a mucus membrane to enter her bloodstream, and Vaughn very unsubtly follows Eggsy’s hand as it locates such a membrane in a very private nether region. Strong leans with vocal aplomb into an orchestral-score accompanied version of John Denver’s “Country Roads” while standing on a landmine to distract Poppy’s thugs. Vaughn includes a hardy-har dissolve cut from a bag of leafy marijuana buds in Eggsy’s mates’ flat to the jungle canopy of Poppy’s Cambodian hideaway, a set of 1950s Americana revival structures that gleam with formica and neon. A later battle down its main boulevard set to “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” includes a sight-gag of two antagonists being impaled by an oversized pair of scissors from the signfront of the salon. Compared to this wildly inventive visual mayhem, the movie’s showpiece action spectacle sequence – Eggsy and Whiskey trapped in a cable-car lift glass orb that is plunging down the snowy slopes of the Alps – seems almost quaint in its relatively standard-issue blockbuster profile.

The weirdest thing about Kingsman: The Golden Circle, however, has to be that among this wacky and entertaining nonsense, it features a forceful (indeed, downright heavy-handed) sociopolitical message (and plot spoilers are necessary in order to explore it). Poppy (Moore is a delight, her murderous tyranny barely lurking beneath her wide-smiling exterior) is unsatisfied with her status as a wealthy and powerful but also highly secretive drug lord. She yearns for fame and recognition as well (although usually if you’re a cartel boss whose name is widely known, you’re on your way to jail at the very least).

Poppy concocts a plan to publicly force the President of the United States (Bruce Greenwood, who has played Presidents before but never one this cartoonishly reactionary) to end the war on drugs and grant her blanket immunity from prosecution by spiking her distributed drug product (it is not made explicit what it is, but it seems to be marijuana or other “soft” recreational drugs) with toxins that will painfully kill anyone who consumes them. If her demands are met, she will distribute the antidote by drone. If they are not, millions will die. Unfortunately the President has internalized decades of anti-drug propaganda and is prepared to wipe away “the drug problem” by letting millions of users and abusers die in agony. The disturbing fascist implications of his approach are made explicit in a manner that Vaughn likely considered ludicrously exaggerated in 2017: the state imprisons millions of infected citizens in cages stacked inside the massive AT&T Stadium in Texas, an over-the-top image that became less fanciful not too long after the movie’s release when the real-world President had migrants caged up in concentration camps not too far from that stadium, along the border with Mexico.

Kingsman: The Secret Service wanted you to think it was being transgressive by blowing up the heads of some plutocrat One-Percenters. But The Golden Circle places leftist-sounding anti-drug and anti-mass-incarceration rhetoric into the mouth of its ruthless supervillain while casting an American President as party to a hard-right law-and-order-driven genocide of drug users. If it isn’t transgressive, it’s certainly provocative. The screenplay by Vaughn and Jane Goldman walks on eggshells with the implications of Poppy’s masterplan, with Eggsy and his allies attempting to foil it, and with how it judges or doesn’t judge the characters it marks as drug users (the toxin turns their veins bright blue, so it’s hard to miss it).

Poppy’s motives are selfish, of course; she doesn’t believe the drug war is any more morally objectionable than the drug trade, she just wants her cake and to eat it to. Eggsy has any number of motivations for stopping her, from saving living friends and loved ones to avenging dead ones, to say nothing of stopping the deaths of millions and taking out the Golden Circle; this movie is very careful to set the stakes in comic-book terms, and not to imply that an unintelligence agent is murdering his way to perpetuating the international drug trade. Even if the movie telegraphs how wrong the President is (his Chief of Staff is played by Emily Watson of all people, but her dramatic acting skills effectively convey the moral horror of his choice and the personal consequences of it as well), he also wants to stop the Golden Circle and thinks, with the logic of a fascist genocidaire, that eliminating its entire customer base in one fell swoop ought to do the trick. Particular caution is given to the victims, who are characterized above all as normal and essentially innocent; some mild opprobrium and comic scolding is reserved for users of drugs, but no one but the inflated hard-on-drugs President actually wants to see them die or even experience pain.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a wildly strange movie more than it’s a good one, despite the high competence of its action scenes, the winking commitment of its cast, and its mix of gleefully violent cynicism and vaulting visual and ideological ambition. This is blockbuster froth, ultimately, and doesn’t really have anything sustainedly serious to say about the drug war. But it’s hard to miss the big-tent fair-mindedness with which it treats drug users of nearly all stripes, not nearly lost amidst the overwhelming maelstrom of comic-book chaos. There are more Kingsman movies coming: a WWI-era prequel drops in February, and Vaughn and Egerton have promised a trilogy-capper for Eggsy, etc. as well. As a 20th Century Fox release, however, one has to wonder how much of the series’ frayed edges will be allowed to persist under the risk-flattening Disney aegis. Hopefully enough to surprise us just a little, which Kingsman: The Golden Circle manages to do, hardly a feat to be sniffed at in the world of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster.