#78 KINGSMEN: GOLDEN CIRCLE

Starring Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Halle Berry, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Pedro Pascal, Edward Holcroft and Elton John. Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn and directed by Matthew Vaughn. Budget $104 million. Running time 141 minutes. Cert 15.

One year after the events of Kingsmen: The Secret Service and everything's gone pear shaped, the entire Kingsmen infra structure has been destroyed in a single co-ordinated airstrike and every agent except for super agent Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and quartermaster Merlin (Mark Strong) has been killed, all on the orders of the world's most successful and richest drugs baron – Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore). She's living in total secrecy orchestrating an insane plot to flood the world with poisoned drugs so that the drug industry will be legitimised she'll be recognised as a powerful and successful business woman. Needing help to find out who targeted them, Eggsy and Merlin head for the US and fall under the patronage of the Statesmen, the American equivalent of Kingsmen, run by Champ (Jeff Bridges) who use the cover of a distillery as cover rather than the men's tailor outfit of the English cousins. There they team up with Statesmen agents Tequila (Channing Tatum), Whiskey (Pedro Pascal) and Ginger Ale (Halle Berry) who's the American version of Merlin. And finally they're off to track Poppy down to her Indonesian volcanic lair that she's decked out to look like a small town American town complete with burger bar, cinema and nail bar. Along the way, our plucky Brit heroes stumble across an old friend who's lost, not only an eye, but his way and memory and needs help to rediscover himself.

And that, apart from a relentless barrage of violence and one utterly disgusting, and not in a good way, sex scene, oh and Elton John, is that.

Matthew Vaughn's fifth movie and sadly his first missfire, this is an ugly, bloated movie with none of the charm and wit of the original nor its lovely story arc. This time round Vaughn and Jane Goldman have developed an overly egged pudding of a plot which sees our heroes bouncing back and forth from America to a series of locations from London to Glastonbury and Italy, each time returning to the US before the final showdown in the villains lair. The action is repetitive and lacks all of the style and originality of the, err original movie and it's nearly 15 minutes longer. The bulging cast features four major American actors who only pop up occasionally for what amounts to a series of cameos, indeed Channing Tatum literally spends most of his role sleeping and Julianne Moore disappears for most of the movie.

And yet there are still things to love about this film, Eggsy's relationship with the Crown Princess Tilde of Sweden is both touching and sweet, as is Eggsy's re-connection with his old mentor, Harry (Colin Firth). Elton John is bloody funny, Mark Strong is, as ever, glorious, funny and fantastically watchable and Julianne Moore hints at a far more interesting character if only she'd been given more time to shine.

But what isn't nice is the rest of this film. The action scenes are rendered almost unwatchable thanks to violent editing and shaky cam, the back and forthing between the mission and the Statesmen Kentucky HQ robs the film of its momentum and the sub plot featuring the President of the United States is annoying and poorly developed. There's also an over reliance on rehashing memorable scenes from the first movie - for example an almost word-for-word remake of the wonderful pub scene as well as far too many, repetitive 'one-take' action sequences. All of which just makes this  feel like a tired rehash and not something fresh and original. You don't get the same exhilaration and nothing in this comes close to capturing the pure genius of the church shootout of The Secret Service.

But the single worst thing of this entire film is a mission that Eggsy goes on to bug a suspected link to Poppy's drug plot, Clara Von Gluckfberg (Poppy Delevingne) who just so happens to be the girlfriend of the failed Kingsmen candidate Charlie Hesketh (Edward Holcroft) from the first film. Charlie is the cybernetically enhanced lead henchman of Poppy.  Eggsy heads off to Glastonbury with a tracking device, mounted on a finger sized condom that will only work if it's introduced to Clara's mucous membrane. This leaves Eggsy with a dilema, especially since he's in a loving relationship with his Swedish girlfriend so he rings her up to ask for permission to shag his target. Naturally she expresses her displeasure with his request, so Eggsy comes up with a genius solution to finger his target. Luckily with a camera just millimetres away from Eggsy's digit we get to watch its trajectory to splashdown. Literally. Now, I'm not a prude, far from it but I found this one scene to be genuinely and completely unnecessary. It could of be handled far more subtly and we wouldn't have had to watch his fingers slide into her red knickers and then disappear from view.

So, overall this is an overblown, over-egged and over long action film, with relentless action and a body count in the hundreds. Poppy Adam's plot seems clever on first hearing, but as the film progresses you start to realise it's just stupid and worst of all the mechanics of it cause continuity problems that don't make sense. The final showdown, which is a long time coming finally lacks punch and relies too much on a pair of robotic killer dogs and then to make it even longer, there's not one, or two, or three but five foes to vanquish at the end and boy that gets pretty boring.

All that said, Taron Egerton is a fantastically watchable actor, he brings an immense amount of charm to his character and the relationships he has with Harry, Tilde and Merlin are a joy, what a shame there wasn't more of that than the other.

6/10