When “Kingsman: The Secret Service” exploded in theaters in 2014, it was a welcome surprise: a smart and scathingly funny spy comedy, with one outlandishly jaw-dropping set piece after another.
Now comes the sequel, “Kingsman: The Golden Circle,” and another surprise: that a premise so ripe with possibilities has devolved so quickly into a mess like this.
Director Matthew Vaughn and writing partner Jane Goldman return with a sequel that tries desperately to rebottle the wow factor that made the first “Kingsman” so bubbly. They fail utterly, piling on an idiotic storyline, lackluster action and an array of stars who are given less screen time than Fox’s marketing department would have you believe.
Our hero Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton) is back, looking as dapper as his mentor Harry Hart (Colin Firth), who left the last movie with a bullet through his eyeball. He’s on his way to see his girlfriend — Tilde (Hanna Alström), the Swedish princess he rescued in the last movie — when he’s ambushed by Charlie Keltner (Edward Holcroft), a failed Kingsman recruit who’s now sporting a robotic arm and a mysterious 24-karat gold tattoo.
The tattoo, the audience learns, is the mark given to henchmen of the world’s most successful drug lord, Poppy (Julianne Moore). She rules her domain from a hidden Cambodian ruin that she’s renovated into a ’50s-themed wonderland, complete with diner, bowling alley, and concert hall where a kidnapped Elton John performs nightly.
Poppy orders a missile strike that wipes out all of the Kingsman agents and the tailor-shop headquarters, leaving alive only Eggsy and the agency’s tech genius, Merlin (Mark Strong). Eggsy and Merlin deploy the “doomsday protocol,” which leads them to the agency’s yee-haw American cousins, called Statesman.
That’s how Eggsy and Merlin land at a Kentucky whiskey distillery, the cover for Statesman’s well-financed operations. They are greeted with suspicion by Agent Tequila (Channing Tatum), but then welcomed by the agency’s boss, Champ (Jeff Bridges), and Merlin’s gadget-savvy counterpart, Ginger Ale (Halle Berry). It’s Ginger Ale who introduces the British spies to the man they have confined in a padded cell: Harry, who has no memory of his life as a Kingsman.
While Eggsy and Merlin try to figure out how to reboot Harry’s memory, they and the Statesman agents also must decipher Poppy’s evil plan for world conquest. Without getting into details, it may be the dumbest plan by an evil villain since the last “Austin Powers” movie.
Vaughn still can toss together an imaginative action sequence, and the opener in a speeding London cab (to the tune of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”) is a cracker. But other bits lack the flash and audacity of the first movie’s signature moves (like the Baptist church free-for-all, or the fireworks display of exploding heads).
Then there’s the bait-and-switch of casting big stars, like Bridges and Berry, for glorified cameos. If you saw the movie’s poster, you’d think Tatum and Egerton were co-leads, but Tatum has less screen time than Elton John.
Worst of all, Vaughn and Goldman want Eggsy to be motivated by the death of beloved supporting characters — but at the same time, by resurrecting Harry as if he were Jon Snow, they treat death as if it’s no big deal. The emotional balance is all out of whack, leaving “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” stuck in a no-man’s-land between sarcasm and sincerity.
* *<br>Kingsman: The Golden Circle<br>The British secret agents meet their American cousins in this hopeless mishmash of a sequel.<br>Where • Theaters everywhere.<br>When • Opens Friday, Sept. 22.<br>Rating • R for sequences of strong violence, drug content, language throughout and some sexual material.<br>Running time • 141 minutes.