Kingsman: The Golden Circle (Matthew Vaughn)

[Stay Puft]

KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
Dir. Matthew Vaughn



IMDb page

[Stay Puft]

I'm the first one to see this?

It's a significant step down from the first film in every way, and I wasn't even a big fan of the first. I'm all in for Brad Allan but even the action was disappointing. The first film went too hard on the shaky cam but still had some bonkers choreography. Outside of a couple cool flashes, the action here goes in ridiculously hard on both shaky cam and crazy special effects to stitch impossible sequences together, and I can't say I'm a fan of the result. I mean, props to Vaughn for basically creating live action Final Fantasy cutscenes, I guess, but I found the overall aesthetics of this thing incredibly wearisome. There's so much bad compositing throughout the film, too, like that establishing shot of the Glastonbury music festival. The whole film looks cheap and ugly. And that's not even getting into the story, and storytelling, and how incredible bad it all is, so arbitrary and low on stakes.

It's intermittently amusing and entertaining, not unlike the first (I laughed pretty hard on a couple occasions, no doubt), but damn it's like watching the bar for Hollywood entertainment plummet before your eyes. Vaughn is trying really hard to make me regret ever enjoying Stardust way back in the day.

[Ivan Drago]

I wasn't a big fan of the first one for its juvenile sense of humor and a villain that sucked all the suspense out of the action scenes, but at least it had energy to it. This slog of a sequel is bogged down by too many subplots and by-the-numbers story arcs.

[Henry Gale]

I don't know what to say about it other than I think it is an obvious step down from the original, but that I still thought this was really good?

Its middle third is pretty damn saggy and the fact that Vaughn's first real cut of this was apparently 3 hours and 20 mins, leading to Fox having conversations about splitting it up into possibly splitting it into two parts at one point is fucking crazy, but all of my other issues (which lean more towards annoyances of convention and some fleeting nitpicks) take place in apoiler territory. So I dunno, despite what it seems to represent on paper, I found it to be a very amiable and thrilling successor to what I hope will be a long-running series with higher highs than this but hopefully no lower lows, since as solid as I do think it it is, it's so clearly a less fresh or strongly scripted movie than the original, with little intention in even being as subversive.

Still, the camera moves incredibly, sometimes unnecessarily so, the production design of Poppy Land alone is one of my favourite things I've seen a film visually facilitate in recent memory, and one scene with Elton John during a broadcast made me laugh beyond reason. Those might be weird things to stick out to mention, but they are definitely distinct highlights that are emblematic of the giddily scattershot nature of it.

It's definitely flawed, and it almost seems to take pride in that nonchalant part of its personality with its brash and ballsy attitude, and that would feel toxic if it wasn't so smartly nutritious in its well-balanced eclectic showcase of performances, setpieces, locations, action, colour palettes, boundless spacial fluidity with the camera, and the consistent cinematic variety that comes with them, for better or worse.

Also what is with John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" being such a major part of so many movies this year?! Two with Channing Tatum alone!

[transmogrifier]

Alternates between dull (the middle hour seems to go on forever, for no particular reason) and mean-spirited, though I'm a fan of the style of action scenes employed here. I did like the choice of love interest, a kind of self-conscious correction in response to the teeth-gnashing over that throwaway scene in the original, but they do absolutely nothing interesting with it, except for a tired callback or two. The worst crime though is that it is not funny in the slightest, whereas the humor was the main saving grace of the original.

[Dukefrukem]

Had fun with this. Needed more Channing Tatum. This franchise is filling a much needed void from 70s cheese Bond films and present day action. I feel like Vaughn does have good action sense. I want to see this universe continue to build.