Kingsman: The Golden Circle

Vaughn pulls one action finesse after another out of his sleeve (it's nice to see neat contact fights in a big blockbuster, and I don't care that it's actually being constricted by a nifty VFX camera and a clever editor), but if he and Goldman went over the line too much last time, here they are incomprehensibly tame. The rushing of relationships at the expense of building a more meaningful story is terribly futile on all fronts. There’s a bunch of kitsch and sentimentality but without a drop of audacity, subversion, or any will to go more toward boldness. This makes the surprising self-sacrifice seem almost out of place and leaves the empathy barometer at rest. It's a hundred and forty minutes long, with enough plots for three films, but not a single one hits the mark. It’s really all quite boring. I want to conclude a trilogy that will rage for two hours on all fronts, then world peace and contentment will reign. (12/05/2017)

I already had problems with the first Kingsman (I thought it was teenage nonsense that doesn’t know the limits of good taste), so it’s no surprise that the sequel didn’t pull me into the cinemas. Actually, I should rate it lower than I am, because it’s clearly weaker than the previous one. But I really don’t give a toss. The Golden Circle is such an uninteresting film that it didn’t even manage to piss me off. Sad. For a moment, I also wanted to complain about how weirdly and poorly the antagonist is drawn, but then I realised that I don’t remember even who was the villain in the first one (and I still can’t recall it!). But I will remember Julianne Moore, so I’ll leave my complaints for another time. :D (09/21/2017)

It slows the pace less and picks up the pace more to the highest revs and cadence of insane, amazing, terrifying, or just perfectly effective ideas, never stopping for a moment. The boundless adoration of the first part does not apply to me, but I enjoyed it tremendously; maybe that's why I can now build Kingsman: The Golden Circle right next to it. Taron Egerton has also matured as an actor and almost doesn't lag at all behind Mark Strong or even Colin Firth. Again, the oddity and disturbing madness of the villain's Bond-like plan bothers me. Several times I even thought it was rising to almost miraculous places before the blue haze painfully brought me back down to earth. (09/21/2017)

In his first sequel, Vaughn had a unique opportunity to play with the "rules" and vices of the sequel, just as he had in the past with fairy-tale, comic, and bond rules. But instead of addressing them, he made fun of them and took advantage of them, so he is slightly defeated by "sequel illness". The result is a film suffering from all the maladies of the sequel, namely more of everything, bigger, longer, more grandiose, more populated, crazier, more excessive and ... And as a result less entertaining (not to be confused with not entertaining). Mainly because the concept did not level up, the length is unjustified, the joke with Elton is repeated until it becomes annoying, Julianne is excellent, but detached from all interaction with others. It is too excessive this time to work as an (almost) regular Bond movie (which the first movie managed to balance), the original characters do not develop at all, there are no emotions except for "Merlin´s singing" sequence and most of the new characters are caricatures without any hint of personality. Does that mean that Vaughn lost his driving force, his ideas and made a pointless average movie? No, it doesn´t. He's a way too good director to do that, and the cast which clearly enjoys it helps him a lot, but the movie is very close to the above-mentioned. (09/20/2017)

I like the first Kingsman, I like Matthew Vaughn, I like movies that aren't afraid to go their own way and have fun with an extremely violent scene in which Colin Firth dispatches a church full of religious fanatics. The director of this action flick hasn't given me any reason to doubt his abilities so far, so I was looking forward to the second installment, but alas, this time Vaughn stumbled. Or rather, it looks like he doesn't care where he steps. The Golden Circle is almost two and a half hours long, has about three action set-pieces (one great, one decent, and one pointless), but completely disappoints in its handling of the new characters. The Statesmen don't impress much, the main villain and her devious plan are quite a sad sight to behold, and it all lacks the lightness, wit and quirkiness of the first film. This one managed to be cool and engaging in every other scene. It's awful to see them trying to do the same thing this time around, and it rarely works. Otherwise, it's mostly talk, everyone is serious, and as the minutes go by it becomes more and more clear that this sequel doesn't really have much to offer. Just Vaughn's lucid action, a good Taron Egerton and an excellent Firth. You know that feeling when you have to make tea out of a used bag? That's it. It's still got some flavour, but it was better in every way last time. And if you had to make it a third time, you might want to give it a miss... (07/27/2018)