In 2014, Matthew Vaughn blew audiences away with a film adaptation of Mark Millar’s Kingsman comics that paid homage to the golden era of spy movies, complete with all the silly gadgets and megalomaniacal plans for world domination, while establishing a unique comic tone of its own. It wasn’t long before the producers got Vaughn to work on a sequel.
Much like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the sequel to Kingsman: The Secret Service faced the unenviable challenge of following up a movie that arrived as a breath of fresh air without just giving the audience more of the same. Kingsman: The Golden Circle is an imperfect movie, but it did a lot of things right.
10 Right: The Opening Set Piece
Unlike The Secret Service, which had the burden of setting up Eggsy’s origin story, The Golden Circle could jump right into the action. Eggsy, now operating under Harry’s “Galahad” codename as a full-fledged member of Kingsman, is ambushed by rejected applicant Charlie from the first one.
This leads to a car chase across London that features some of the most daring stunts in recent memory. Suffice to say, the sequel gets off to an explosive start.
9 Wrong: Slow Pacing
The pacing of Kingsman: The Golden Circle is painfully slow at times. The stakes are established as being really high as the government fills stadiums with citizens in cages, but each set piece takes a roundabout way to move the plot forward just a couple of inches.
After the first act rapidly sets up an earth-shattering conflict for Eggsy, the second act drags on for what feels like hours before a redeeming final battle in Poppy’s Cambodian hideout. The movie’s almost two-and-a-half hours long, and it certainly feels like it.
8 Right: Taron Egerton’s Committed Performance
Instead of falling into the black hole of phoning in sequel appearances that has claimed many once-great actors like Bruce Willis, Taron Egerton brought as much charm and likability to his follow-up to his star-making turn as he did to his star-making turn.
While The Golden Circle’s script isn’t as tight as that of The Secret Service, Egerton remained as committed as ever to the role of Eggsy.
7 Wrong: Predictable Twist
There’s a plot twist in the middle of Kingsman: The Golden Circle when Jack Daniels, played by Pedro Pascal, reveals that he’s actually working with the bad guys.
The problem with this twist is that it can be seen coming from a mile away. It isn’t so much foreshadowed as it is telegraphed.
6 Right: Elton John
Throughout Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Elton John is shown to be held captive at Poppy’s hideout, forced to perform personal concerts at her beck and call. This is a hysterical twist on the lavish lifestyles lived by Bond villains.
But the situation is just the setup. It’s John’s performance as himself that really sells it. He genuinely appears to be a miserable prisoner, and when he turns the tables on his captors, it’s a glorious moment.
5 Wrong: Glastonbury
The weirdest detour in the plot of The Golden Circle is when Eggsy is sent to Glastonbury Festival to seduce Charlie’s ex-girlfriend and place a tracking device literally inside her. The setup is bizarre and the closeups are wildly unnecessary.
Plus, Eggsy calls his girlfriend beforehand to tell her what he’s going to do, which puts a strain on their relationship. It’s not dramatically engaging; it’s just awkward and strange, because the situation isn’t at all relatable. Now, it makes sense why the Bond producers give 007 a new love interest in every movie – to prevent scenes like this from happening.
4 Right: Statesman
After the headquarters of Kingsman is destroyed and Eggsy and Merlin are the only survivors, they discover that there’s a similar spy organization in the U.S. called Statesman, and travel to the whiskey distillery where they operate to team up with them.
This expanded the franchise’s world significantly and introduced a bunch of interesting new characters played by awesome actors like Halle Berry, Jeff Bridges, Pedro Pascal, and Channing Tatum.
3 Wrong: Bloated Action
While the ski lift sequence is pretty exciting, most of the set pieces in The Golden Circle are so bloated and dragged-out that they wear out their welcome long before they’re over.
It’s like Vaughn and co. knew they couldn’t top the “Free Bird” church scene from the first movie and decided to just bombard the audience with one action sequence after another instead.
2 Right: Bringing Back Harry Hart
Although the resurrection of Harry Hart in The Golden Circle undermines his tragic death scene in The Secret Service, which motivated Eggsy to defeat the bad guys once and for all, it wouldn’t have felt like Kingsman without Colin Firth’s quintessential gentleman spy.
And he wasn’t just brought back to life, good as new; there was a twist in that he’s now a lot less competent than he used to be, demonstrated in a subversive riff on the original’s pub brawl.
1 Wrong: Losing The Original’s Satirical Edge
Ultimately, Kingsman: The Golden Circle doesn’t live up to its predecessor, because it’s nowhere near as smart. The first Kingsman movie was a sharp satire of spy movies that actually had something to say about the myths peddled by the genre and used its violence and sexual content in smart ways.
The second one goes the lowbrow route a few too many times. It’s like Matthew Vaughn responded to the criticism of the first movie’s closing anal sex gag by stretching that crass tone over the entire second movie.
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