Guns, suits, and kicking ass.
Those are the three pillars of Matthew Vaughn’s “Kingsman” series, which tracks the adventures of a secret spy organization that stops various global cabals from destroying the world via cartoonish ultra-violence and a devilish sense of humor.
Both “Kingsman: The Secret Service” and its sequel “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” revel in an obnoxious combination of mid-century British aesthetics with new school juvenilia.
Vaughn’s crass version of wink-wink sophistication ostensibly updates the Bond playbook for a coarser world, but it mostly telegraphs his supposed cleverness and nostalgia-happy referentiality, all of which is bathed in excessive blood and profanity.
The films’ box-office success indicates the obvious: nihilistic provocations are a cheap, but effective high.Vaughn’s latest entry into the series is a prequel, the long-delayed “The King’s Man,” which traces the early-20th century origins of the Kingsman organization.
While it explains how the Kingsman organization was founded,
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