I Couldn’t Make It Through "Kingsman: The Golden Circle", Here’s Why

By Nicolette Petra

It takes a lot for me to walk out of a movie. I like to see things through to the end. I figure that a great deal of people put a great deal of time and effort into creating films, so I like to give them a chance to win me over. But, even after making past the halfway mark in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, I turned off the TV and left the room.

Truth be told, I thoroughly enjoyed Kingsman: The Secret Service, the first film in the soon-to-be trilogy come the prequel’s release in 2020. Sure, the humour was a bit bro-y, but it hit the mark when it came to comedic timing, pop culture references, and English comicality. The film was fast-paced, action-packed, gruesome, had serious moments concerning moral codes, investigated the inner workings of high and low British society, gave us an underdog story, and characters to love and root for. So, when I heard there would be a sequel back in 2017, I was stoked.

Unfortunately, Kingsman 2 shot my excitement in the head faster than Samuel L. Jackson shot Colin Firth at the end of the first film. 

The opening chase scene felt like a cheap knock-off of every action sequence in the first film, and the CGI made it look more like a bad video game than a blockbuster movie. Eggsy seemed to have forgotten his origins as a rebellious, mistreated, family-oriented underdog, and had been flattened into a quintessential ‘spy-by-day, lover-by-night’ character. The set up of the story was slow and required backtracking for context. Yet, these things weren’t what made me walk out.

It was the introduction to the film’s villain, Poppy, that raised the first alarm in my mind.

After an unnecessary monologue about why she likes all things 50’s, Poppy (Julianne Moore) asks one of her henchmen in a honey-sweet tone to put another one of her henchmen in a mincer. Now, while I was all for the gore of the first Kingsman making a resurgence in the sequel, this request never had any real motive behind it. I could appreciate that the filmmakers had made the villain a female businesswoman, but to have her motivated only by greed and to execute this motive through a girly, too-big-smiley, housewife exterior juxtaposed with a sadistic interior, felt baseless.

I’m not saying that villains have to be ugly, old and wear all black. Look at Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada), Regina George (Mean Girls), and Cersei Lannister (Game of Thrones). They had in-depth backstories; multiple well-thought-out motives like a crumbling home life, teenage self-doubt, and protecting family; great fashion sense; and lacking moral compasses. On the other hand, Poppy was a villain for the most basic and underdeveloped children’s movie reasoning that exists: ‘she’s just innately evil.’ We never hear a backstory, or any justification or humanisation of Poppy. Even Whiskey, the double-crossing Statesman spy, was given a short monologue about how he lost his wife and unborn child to preface his reasons for betraying the intelligence agency. Poppy had no such treatment. We like our female villains twisted, sister!

And then there was Roxy’s death.

Roxy was the lone female recruit, friend and potential love interest of Eggsy in Kingsman: The Secret Service. But, it wasn’t long after her first appearance into this film that she was killed in one of Poppy’s missile attacks. She helps Eggsy get through a dinner with his royal girlfriend’s parents, discovers a vital piece of information about the Golden Circle which she reveals to Eggsy, and is then promptly and unceremoniously blown to smithereens. I remember turning to my sister with a look that said, ‘Surely they haven’t just killed her off,’ not because I didn’t think an attack of this proportion could happen, but because Merlin survived the attack, and Harry returns from the dead – both characters seem to avoid inevitable death. Yet, Roxy has no such luck. It felt as though as soon as the relationship between Eggsy and Princess Tilde was established as a solid ‘ship’, Roxy was of no use to the plot anymore. If she wasn’t a romantic interest, she was of no interest to the story or the filmmakers. In all honesty, one of the main reasons I kept watching the film was because I was sure she would make a return. I was wrong. This clever, hardworking, loyal character with very human fears (jumping out of aeroplanes), whose character arc and growth had been so well developed in the first film was wiped from the face of the earth.

But my persistence truly ceased when the value and character of three women – a villain’s girlfriend, Princess Tilde and Ginger Ale – were diminished in one fell swoop. The basic premise of the scene was that Eggsy had to place a tracker on the girlfriend of one of the villains. Yet, a simple tracking device placed on the body of the woman or ingested via food or drink would not do for the filmmakers. No, they made it so that Eggsy had to -and I can not believe I’m going to say this, but - finger the woman, grossly violating her body and betraying her trust. The point is, there were so many other alternatives but the fact the filmmakers decided to go with this option was disgusting, objectifying and just plain unnecessary.

But wait – it gets worse.

Our beloved Eggsy is so morally conflicted about whether to do this for the good of the mission that he calls his girlfriend to tell her. Her response? If they were in a committed married relationship, then she would be more comfortable with the whole situation. Is that not the same as saying, as long as we’re in an exclusive relationship, you can go all James Bond every other mission-related woman you encounter? What’s more, while Tilde is upset and refuses to take Eggsy’s calls for a time, therefore appearing to have some resolve, the screenwriters end the film with her and Eggsy neatly patching things up and getting hitched. Thus, Tilde remains a mere damsel for Eggsy to save once again (this time from the fatal drug Poppy infects the world with) and a silver platter upon which the writers present Eggsy with a rags to riches story.

Finally, there’s Ginger Ale (Halle Berry), the Statesmen’s counterpart to the Kingsman’s tech wizard Merlin. She watches on as Eggsy performs the mission on the villain’s girlfriend, only for her to say to Merlin that she’s “used to” seeing this sort of thing i.e. Welcome to Statesmen: we’re used to seeing men betray women’s trust in an intimate way.

It was following this exact scene that I turned off the TV. What I had experienced so far was not only a lack of female characters but a lack of depth in all of them; a villain who it felt like was made to be female because the film needed female representation; the objectification and betrayal of one woman; another who fell into the antiquated and wilfully ignorant role of the love interest who forgives, forgets and rewards her S/O with sex after he ‘saves the world’ (again); and the death of the strongest female character in the whole series, Roxy, who could’ve been given a whole lot more screen time and character development. Hell, she could have had her own spin-off movie if the writers had been smart.

Of course, I needed to know how the movie ended. Not because I was hooked, but because I wanted to see if by some brilliant and surprising twist the film would lifted its female characters out of the archaic and outdated Hollywood stereotypes it had placed them in. I had hoped it would become a critique on female representation. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

Apart from Ginger Ale becoming the first female Statesmen agent, nothing much changed. While this was good to see, it was unoriginal considering we saw the girl-running-with-the-guys storyline in the first film with Roxy. It would have been far more impactful and meaningful to have the Roxy and Ginger interact with each other, speak about their experiences in the agencies, support each other and become fast friends.

As the credits rolled, I wondered if the reason for my feelings towards the series had changed because the filmmakers had. After a quick Google search, I found that director and screenwriter duo, Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, had worked on both the first and second films. Even more shocking, was that Goldman had written the screenplay for X-Men: First Class and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – both movies with great female characters. I scratched my head. Where did Kingsman: The Golden Circle go wrong? How could a film with such archetypal females be given the green light in 2017? Was the sequel simply riding on the coattails of the first film’s success?

I didn’t know. But here’s what I did take away from the film:

Don’t just throw females, or any other group of people for that matter, into a film for the sake of filling a quota or trying to appeal to a wider demographic. The audience will see right through this lame façade faster than Roxy’s death by missile. To quote Jo March in the recent trailer for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film Little Women, “Women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts; and they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying the love is all a woman is fit for.”

Give us women – nay! give us characters – with depth, purpose, flaws, backstories and quirks. Make them full, well-rounded, and rough-around-the-edges, for these are the things that make us human and interesting. These are the things that make characters relatable.

I couldn’t look away from the first Kingsman, and it’s a film I continue to go back to. However, by comparison, Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle, with its video-game graphics and fight scenes, flat and unfeeling dialogue, and bland characters, was a bitter disappointment. I’ll give Kingsman 3: The King’s Man a go because of my love for Gemma Arterton, Ralph Fiennes, WW1 films and the hope that it will have the same punch as the first Kingsman and far better female characters than the second. That said, it has a lot of ground to make up, and I can’t guarantee that if I walk out, I’ll walk back in again.