Kingsman: The Golden Circle has one major flaw

The movie Kingsman: The Golden Circle has one major flaw.

Overall I had a blast with Kingsman: The Golden Circle. The action scenes were incredibly well-shot and visually stunning. The humor combined with the over-the-top violence worked well, and I enjoyed the new cast. If you haven’t read our site’s review on the film, read it here. Even though the sequel was fun, there was one major issue with this movie.

My problem wasn’t that Channing Tatum hardly had any screen time, or that the movie had another gratuitous sex scene, or that they killed off Merlin (even though I didn’t enjoy any of those moments). It was that killed another major character from the first movie, Agent Roxy. For those that may not remember this character, she was training with our protagonist Eggsy throughout the first film, Kingsman: The Secret Service. She was, in many ways, better at being an agent than Eggsy was. She was smarter, tougher and was actually the one that completed the Kingsman recruiting process. She passed the test and became “Lancelot”, unlike Eggsy, who only became a Kingsman because of special circumstances.

When I saw Kingsman: The Golden Circle, I was looking forward to seeing Roxy and Eggsy work together on another adventure, but she is killed off in first ten minutes. When Charlie’s leftover robotic arm hacks the Kingsman’s database, their location coordinates are revealed. Poppy then fires missiles at these locations, killing all the other Kingsman including Roxy. Now, if Roxy was involved the whole film and ended up being killed in the third act for dramatic effect of something like that, it would have felt earned. But that’s not what happened.

I did not watch many trailers before I saw this movie, perhaps the marketing telegraphed that Roxy would not be around. In Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the last thing we see her do is feed Eggsy lines during his dinner date with Tilde’s parents. The movie starts to set up that Roxy may have some feelings for Eggsy during this scene. They are sending each other somewhat cute text messages and we get to see Roxy’s reaction to Eggsy calling her a “best friend and a best agent” with a winky face. The scene is a funny reveal, but the mood is immediately shifted when the incredibly large mansion that Roxy is immediately blown up by a huge missile. For the rest of the movie, I was waiting for some sort of twist reveal that Roxy would come back gloriously at the last moment when Eggsy and Harry Hart needed it most, but that wasn’t the case. In the words of Eggys “This ain’t that kind of movie bra.”

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As of this writing, there has been no news that Sophie Cookson will return in a potential Kingsman sequel. This franchise has brought back characters from the dead before (Colin Firth’s Henry Hart), so resurrecting Roxy wouldn’t necessarily be out of the question, especially since we do not see her die, but for now, we do not know. I would hope to see her return, but thankfully this moment didn’t ruin the entire experience.