Firth, with his crisp accent, the crisper line of his suits, and his surrogate-father air, was a highlight from the first film, and his presence is felt at the start of the second. It's not a spoiler that Colin Firth's Harry Hart turns up alive in The Golden Circle (he's in the trailer) and it's not worth spoiling how it happens, simply because his killing gets undone with the screenplay equivalent of a hurried hand wave.
Their members, Tequila (Channing Tatum), Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), and Champagne (Jeff Bridges), eschew the tailored suits for more casual wear, falling stylewise into a blurry area between "cowboy" and "oil baron," and wielding shotguns, bullwhips, and electric lassos. Statesman is based in Kentucky, and their cover operation is considerably more expansive than a bespoke tailoring operation - it's a bourbon distillery that happens to be massively successful (a convenient plot development). Like The Secret Service, the sequel is less interested in showing how Kingsman operates than in exploring what happens when it gets blown up - literally: The new baddie, a ruthless drug kingpin and dedicated '50s nostalgist named Poppy (Julianne Moore, in what's just one of her two unhinged retro housewife roles this fall), wings a bunch of missiles at the facilities early in the film, forcing Eggsy and chief tech support Merlin (Mark Strong) to seek help from a sibling organization in the US, a group that turns out to be called, appropriately, Statesman. Not that the secret spy ring gets much screentime as a functional organization in The Golden Circle. And like the first film, the new Kingsman stars Taron Egerton, engaging and always a little too sweet-faced for the material, as Eggsy, a gifted working-class kid who shakes up the upper-crusty traditions of a secret spy ring, hidden away behind a London tailor shop and operating conveniently unfettered by government oversight. Like the first film, The Golden Circle is directed by Matthew Vaughn, who cowrote the script, based on a Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons graphic novel, with frequent collaborator Jane Goldman.
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Subtitled The Golden Circle, the sequel is more intent on selling you some movie tie-in whiskey instead, and maybe also some movie tie-in shaving products. The new movie doesn't want to sell you such uneasy entertainments. Whatever good times it offered were the good times of drinking with fun strangers at a bar who are almost certainly going to beat you up later in the night. The film began as an energetic, rude riff on the sacrosanct brand of Britain's most famous fictional spy and ended up somewhere in the realm of South Park humor, except crueler and more horny. 2015's Kingsman: The Secret Service gleefully massacred the Westboro Baptist Church for kicks, blew up the head of then-president Obama as part of an apocalypse-averted punchline, and concluded with a gag about anal that didn't skewer the sexual politics of vintage James Bond flicks so much as just restate (and relish) them in blunter terms.
Say what you will about the first installment of what's now a whole secret agent–spoofing action franchise - but at least it had the guts to commit to the snickering nihilism that emerged as its defining quality. Yet somehow, this makes it so much worse. The new sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a far better-behaved movie than the first Kingsman.