Review: Kingsman sequel is a service Her Majesty would prefer to be kept secret

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In the halcyon days of 2015 – when we only had 10 Marvel movies to deal with, and Donald Trump's menace was confined to midtown Manhattan – Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: The Secret Service came along and carved a gleefully subversive gash in the corpse of blockbuster cinema. On its surface, the super-spy film was yet another comic-book adaptation involving suave world-saving heroes and dastardly world-conquering villains. But somewhere between its church-set massacre scored to Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird and the climax in which Barack Obama's head explodes in a mini-mushroom cloud of neon-coloured viscera, Kingsman announced itself as a wild, reckless, gleefully immoral work of pop nihilism.

So when news trickled out about a sequel, my stomach roiled. If Vaughn could pull off the same trick twice – that is, mixing genre-friendly elements and James Bond send-ups with brash moments of subversive bloodletting – good for him. But a sequel by definition needs to be bigger, louder and almost always stupider.

Did Vaughn, who had wisely walked away from sequelizing his previous films X-Men: First Class and Kick-Ass, finally figure out how to crack the follow-up code? Would this be the breakthrough franchise filmmaking was waiting for? Would the director top history's most off-the-chart closing sex scene, courtesy of his first Kingsman film?

The people, I guess, demanded to know. And after watching Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the answers are definitively: No. No. And yes – dear lord, yes.

In almost every way, Vaughn's new Kingsman is an unwieldly inflation of the original, although not so much by single-minded design as if by studio committee. It is so jam-packed with characters, set-pieces, exotic locales, plot twists, explosions, gun-fights, dead dogs, robotic dogs and Elton John (really!) that it threatens to collapse under the sheer weight of all its, well, stuff. And it is merely stuff we're talking about – amorphous elements that never approach substance or purpose. Everything in The Golden Circle is just there, existing, for no reason in particular.

Well, almost everything. As one character noted in the first film, "I always thought the old James Bond films were only as good as their villains." That line was funny when juxtaposed against the original film's chief sociopath, a half-benevolent, half-insane Steve Jobs facsimile played by a game Samuel L. Jackson. And the joke works fine here, too, with Julianne Moore playing Poppy, a Martha Stewart-esque drug kingpin upset that her empire isn't as legitimate an enterprise as the tobacco or alcohol racket. Moore, never letting a line slip past her ruby-red lips without adopting an insanely wide grin, takes whatever scenery Vaughn provides and tosses it into a meat-grinder, feverishly chewing on the remaining gristle.

Unfortunately Poppy is just one of a dozen-plus distractions in The Golden Circle's flabby story, which hopscotches around the globe at a disconcerting pace, prioritizing quirky settings (a high-tech lab in the mountains of Italy! a Kentucky distillery as designed by the CIA! a Cambodian jungle made up like 1950s Anytown, USA!) over narrative tension, character-building or one-10th of the nervy, pulpy satire of the original.

So, instead of our heroes – namely 007 stand-in Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and his Q-ish aide Merlin (Mark Strong) – simply facing off against Poppy and causing fiery mayhem along the way, Vaughn shoves in all manner of ancillary bloat. There's Eggsy's back-from-the-dead mentor Harry (Colin Firth); the side villain Charlie (Edward Holcroft), who, as my partner Erin pointed out, harbours a serious case of Winter Soldier envy; the callous U.S. president (Bruce Greenwood) whose presence complicates Vaughn's politics after his Obama stunt from the last film; and a quartet of American spies who seem like a whisky barrel full of fun, but are completely wasted (there is a special place in Movie Hell for giving audiences a taste of Channing Tatum only to put him on literal ice for the rest of the film).

Oh, but there is that sex scene.

If you happen to watch The Golden Circle after all this, you'll know what I'm referring to the moment it starts to reveal its oh-no-really pieces: Eggsy, a nubile blonde and a small but conspicuous tracking device. Yet even with this warning, you will be shocked at just how far the set-up goes, and just what sort of reaction it is supposed to inspire. Looking at how Vaughn closed out his original Kingsman, I took this new copulation gag as a boundary-pushing joke that dares to marry the disparate sensibilities of Guy Ritchie and Gaspar Noé. But that reading may be too generous. Instead, as with the film that surrounds it, the scene may just be too drunk on its brazen conception to notice how limp it truly is.