Kings­man: The Gold­en Circle

When Kings­man: The Secret Ser­vice was released in 2015, Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron was ready­ing him­self for a gen­er­al elec­tion most media com­men­ta­tors and poll­sters expect­ed him to lose. The film’s mas­sive box office suc­cess and Cameron’s emphat­ic re-elec­tion are unre­lat­ed in the wider scheme of things, but when viewed togeth­er they reveal some­thing telling about which side Britain’s bread was but­tered back then.

Flash for­ward to today and, hav­ing missed the final flac­cid thrusts of Camero­nism, it seems entire­ly fit­ting that a new Kings­man film should arrive at a time when There­sa May’s gov­ern­ment is going through a messy pulling out process. The Gold­en Cir­cle does not direct­ly address the issue of Brex­it – that’s been left to the not-so-sub­tly titled Kings­man com­ic, ​‘The Big Exit’, pub­lished this sum­mer – but there are cer­tain sim­i­lar­i­ties between this film and the cur­rent state of UK pol­i­tics. Name­ly, the strange, unshak­able feel­ing that every­thing and noth­ing has changed – that the British pub­lic is get­ting exact­ly what it asked for, which is not nec­es­sar­i­ly what it wants.

This is an impor­tant com­par­i­son, not least because the ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics – the implic­it endorse­ment of the aris­toc­ra­cy as the de fac­to cus­to­di­ans of the mass­es – and ram­pant prod­uct place­ment present in both Kings­man films belies the notion that they are in some way satiris­ing the rul­ing elite. Indeed, The Gold­en Cir­cle is a film high on the fumes of its own tox­ic brand, a back­ward-look­ing boys’ fan­ta­sy in thrall to the estab­lish­ment that has absolute­ly noth­ing to say about the roles class, con­sumerism, nation­al­ism and sex play with­in our soci­ety. It’s a glib and puerile throw­back in more ways than its mak­ers intended.

With tongues set firm­ly in cheek, direc­tor Matthew Vaughn and screen­writer Jane Gold­man once again set about osten­si­bly sub­vert­ing var­i­ous spy movie tropes while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly val­i­dat­ing James Bond’s post-Bourne rein­ven­tion as a seri­ous, decid­ed­ly mod­ern dou­ble agent. And once again the pair dial com­ic book writer Mark Millar’s more juve­nile and misog­y­nis­tic ten­den­cies all the way up, dar­ing us to take offence as they replace wink-wink dou­ble enten­dre with blunt-force banter.

Yet where The Secret Ser­vice was, at the very least, super­fi­cial­ly enter­tain­ing as an auda­cious, unapolo­get­i­cal­ly brash exer­cise in post­mod­ern genre film­mak­ing, The Gold­en Cir­cle is sur­pris­ing­ly tame by com­par­i­son. Its over­long plot sees Eggsy (Taron Egerton) attempt to save the lives of mil­lions of peo­ple who have been infect­ed with a mys­te­ri­ous acute ill­ness, includ­ing his sodomy-lov­ing Swedish squeeze Princess Tilde (Han­na Alström). Iron­i­cal­ly enough, the film itself appears to have come down with a nasty case of sequelitis, with a glut of addi­tion­al char­ac­ters – Chan­ning Tatum’s whiskey-slug­ging cow­boy being the worst of a very weak bunch – gad­gets and sub­plots fail­ing to pro­vide the required anti­dote. The like­li­hood of a third film at this point seems a dead cert.