Starring Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Julianne Moore

Directed by Matthew Vaughn

When their headquarters are destroyed and members of their secret organisation are targeted, Eggsy (Taron Everton) and Merlin (Mark Strong) follow a trail to the United States where they join forces with their American division to take on the psychotic Poppy (Julianne Moore).

Matthew Vaughn follows up his 2014 adaptation of Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons’ comic book The Secret Service with another two hours of espionage mayhem, but even at this early stage the franchise is starting to suffer from the law of fatigue. More is definitely less, and unfortunately the conceit that making things bigger, louder, longer will make a better film just isn’t the case. Baggy, bloated, and still reliant on that laddish sense of humour that tainted the original, it’s the sort of movie that happens in front of you rather than engages you.

Michael Gambon and Jeff Bridges both play heads of their respective houses but were clearly only needed for a half or a whole day’s shooting. Julianne Moore is having great fun chewing up the scenery as the ultra-psychotic drug baroness Poppy, dispatching disloyal henchmen by robotic Rottweilers and feeding them into a giant mincing machine. Bruce Greenwood plays the President of the US for the umpteenth time, but it’s a broad Trump-alike and I imagine Emily Watson (she plays his head of staff) wondered what she was doing in something like this.

Brash, disposable and lacking the church massacre or prime henchman of the first movie (Edward Holcroft’s Charlie with his robotic arm-ageddeon limb is no substitute for Sofia Boutella’s blade-legged gazelle), the tech has gone from daft to plain preposterous, making the cars and heavy artillery that we mocked in Die Another Day look authentic. I get it that this is a comic book world of heightened reality and that everything is dialled up to infinity, but a few soundtrack zingers aside, this is just cinema of the excess. The score gets a mention for its tonal shifts between John Barry and David Arnold’s Bond, and a fanfare from Silvestri’s The Avengers.

Verdict: A Roger Moore Bond relic from the 70s with added misogyny and Elton John, this is Kingsman XL, but bad manners maketh not a good movie. 5/10

Nick Joy