Kingsman: The Golden Circle ★★½

BOND spoof Kingsman: The Golden Circle is wildly uneven and, at times, plain stupid.

But whenever you start to get bored, director Matthew Vaughan throws in a visual so ridiculously inventive or off-beat it draws you back in to the all-round lunacy.

In the end, it doesn’t match the original and just makes for a reasonably entertaining couple of hours.

Based on a comic book, the first film was released in 2014 and was similarly scattergun in its approach.

But it also benefitted from originality and irreverence. The sequel lacks the same level of originality and surprisingly, apart from the swearing, is far less edgy.

Granted it has one sequence where a man is fed into a meat grinder and turned into a hamburger which his killer is forced to eat, but it’s played very comically. Shifting most of the action to the United States also doesn’t provide anything particularly interesting, other than an excuse to present a John Denver song four different ways.

The film is stuffed full of acting talent, but most of them are given little or nothing to do or generally miscast.

If you recall, the first film was set in England where a secret agency battling international crime, called Kingsman, was located. Colin Firth played its top operative, Harry Hart, with a nice mixture of style and ruthlessness.

Following the death of another agent, Harry gives the man’s larrikin son Eggsy, played by Taron Egerton, a chance at putting his misdirected energy and arrogance to use by joining the agency. Of course Eggsy ended up more than proving himself, helping save the world while retaining his ‘bad boy’ style.

Egerton again plays the role well, but Firth’s character is missing for the most part this time around while Mark Strong continues to be miscast as IT wizard Merlin.

Samuel L. Jackson played the super villain in the third film whereas for the sequel the off choice of Julianne Moore does not work.

The set-up is good, with her secret island lair including a reconstruction of a 1950s street complete with diner, doughnut shop, beauty salon and retro theatre, but Moore is too serious an actress for the over-the-top portrayal required to match the overall tone of the film.

There is a rock star extended cameo that is fun but actors like Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry and Emily Watson make little or no lasting impression.

There is too much Computer Generated Imagery and the quality is strangely uneven for a major budget film and detracts from the otherwise impressive action set pieces.

The fact that none of the actors or crew set foot in the United States, despite half the film being located there, is a damning indictment on the over-use of CGI.

The making of a third film has already been announced so they will have another chance to recreate some of the original’s charm.