Film review of Kingsman 2- by Film Brain

Full text transcript of the film review of Kingsman 2:

Hello and welcome to Project, and on this installment, the Kingsman have to face their destruction at the hands of the Golden Circle. The Kingsmen are near the White House after a set of missile strikes at the hands of pulpy people. Julianne Moore, who runs the Secret Garden Circle that has claimed a monopoly on the drug trade. The two left Attaran Edgerton’s EXI and Mark Strongs Merlin, who have to turn’s their American cousins statesman for help, including Pedro Pascale’s Wisky, Channing Tatum, Tequila, Halle Berry’s ginger ale and Jeff Bridges champagne. But they also make a big discovery inside statesman Harry Hart. Colin Firth is back from the dead. One of 2015 biggest surprises for a lot of people was Kingsman The Secret Service, which was brought to you by the team that made Kickass and there was adapted for a Macmillan graphic novel called The Secret Service, only then through a window overseen by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. The latter also directed and very much did what Kickass did for the superhero movie to the spy film. And it was very much an affectionate, tongue in cheek, over-the-top pastiche of that genre. So it had all the elements of the sort of James Bond movie of the gadgets and the sex. And it did it in a very cheeky, irreverent way.

And it was very much in on the joke. It knew what it was referencing and parenting. But at the same time, it also was quite sincere in a lot of ways, which undercut the potential smarminess of it. Really, I think a lot of people have dismissed it before it came out as, oh, it’s just chav James Bond. But then we’re really pleasantly surprised, especially because the action that movie is some of the best that we’ve had in the past decade. I mean, you just have to ask anyone about Kingsmen and they’ll probably bring up the church scene because that is a virtuoso sequence. So now, two years later, we have the four, the Golden Circle. And the question is whether they be able to match the first film. They’re fully capable of doing it. We have the same writer, same director, all the cast returning. And of course, we have this whole new set of characters who are representing the statesmen. Surely with those ingredients will be able to get something that was up to the level of the Secret Service? Unfortunately, no. The Golden Circle is a mass novel that has pleasures, but it is a mass. The Golden Circle opens with this big fat action sequence that takes up much of the first 10 minutes of the movie.

And I don’t just mean, oh, there’s a little bit of preamble and then we get to the action now. I mean, from minute one, we are thrust right in the midst of it. It is full on right from the outset. It’s a sequence that loudly announces what the sequel is going to be, which is the same as the original, but bigger and more in-your-face, quite literally. In fact, on that last part, because this action sequence is exi fighting Charlie, who you might remember as the Kingsmen canidate that was rejected in the first film in the back of a moving taxicab, all the while they’re being chased by the cars, the firing upon them at the same time. And it’s this very invested, very CGI heavy set piece. All the while, Matthew Vaughn is shooting this with the same sort of camera that he brought to a number of sequences in Kingsmead in that the cameras got this very continuous movement, obviously stitched together digitally. But even still, we’re in this very claustrophobic environment and that’s struggling against each other, almost pressed up against not just the inside walls of the cab, but also the inside walls of the frame itself. And it’s very much this assault on your senses, not least because they’re blaring music going on at the same time.

And my first real thought was watching the Golden Circle was maybe one of too much, too big, too early. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be invested in this particular early points in the film. I mean, even though I liked the first film, I’ve only just been reintroduced to the main character. And I’ve also been reduced to another character that I barely remembered from. The first one is sort of emblematic of the Golden Circle in that it’s trying to do the bigger is better thing of all sequels try to do, but it falls into the same trap of the usual follow up while trying to make itself massive and, you know, being a second helping of everything we loved about the first film, it misses that core crucial ingredient, which is to say it’s hard, it’s not missing entirely from this thing. But really, I think the the biggest problem with the Golden Circle is its indifference to its own structure, the best way of. Describing the actual story of the Golden Circle is trying to imagine Goldman and Vaughn having a pitch meeting where they just wrote down a whiteboard every idea they had for the sequel, and then they just incorporated all of it into the script. They didn’t throw any of them away. They’re all in here somewhere, regardless of the execution. And then they just filmed it. It feels like this really so patchwork, episodic all over the place structure.

And it’s a really huge problem for the film, because if you compare it to the Secret Service, that film had a very strong backbone in that we had this My Fair Lady Slash Pygmalion plot about the sort of rags to sort of riches of exes starts off as a street smart chaffe, and then you become civilized. But you sort of carries those abilities from his previous life into this new one as a secret agent. And he sort becomes the best of both worlds. There’s this real transformation, this arc that was very much the emotional center of that first film. Well, I’m basically saying is the first portion, the sequel is clearly missing Colin Firth. To be fair, that is somewhat understandable. One of my complaints about the previous film was that the final portion of the film wants Firth had exited the proceedings. There was a bit of a void created by his presence. Because of that, you desperately want first to arrive back on the scene and he does 40 minutes into this movie and the film has to go through these real contortions to bring this character back. Suffice to say, you’re either on board with the explanation here or you aren’t. It’s really going to be a leap of faith for audiences without giving any thing away. He’s brought back through the power of science, really preposterous science.

But, hey, it’s a Kingsmead movie. It’s full of gadgets. You just got to go with it, especially if you want to bring Colin Firth back. And I think the fact they did so is a sort of tacit acknowledgment that, yeah, if we were thinking of making this into a franchise, it was a mistake to kill him off. First casting, which is very much against time. A lot of ways he’s easily one of the best parts of both of these movies. It’s not a pay cheque appearance for him. He clearly commits to playing this character and the where we’ve found him in this movie. I don’t really want to give too much away about where the character is, because the advertising itself, as it really told us too much about the return of first character, but also war with the character of Harry is brought back. He’s not quite back until later in the movie. The film still feels need to sideline him further and then sideline him a bit more after that. And I found that a bit infuriating because if you aren’t going to bring this character back, stop putting barriers up, use this character properly. Eventually they do manage to get this character back to where he was in the first film. And at that point, we’re allowed to actually see both EXI and Harry working together, which is quite satisfying.

Payoff if you’ve seen both films, because the original movie, one of the problems that I have is that we never actually saw them working together in the field. I know the idea is that he was meant to replace him at last. That promise is finally sort of, you know, capitalized upon in the sequel. It’s just that I just wish they didn’t take so much effort because this whole stuff with Harry is another burden on the film that already has far too many weights on it. By far, the biggest waste in this film’s back is the sheer number of characters it has. The original Kings had this huge cast list and many of them do return for this follow up. The problem is most of them aren’t going to be sticking around for long unless the names are Mark Strong, Colin Firth or Taryn Edgerton. And I think the Cole that happens early on. This movie is an attempt to try and avoid this issue because we’ve we’ve basically eradicated most of the supporting cast from the first film. But that’s a bit of a problem in of itself because we bring these characters back. In that case, we bring a certain character back that I thought show promise, but wasn’t used to have full potential in the first film and then drop a bridge on them.

Why do that?

Nevertheless, that gives us a relatively clean slate to bring the statesmen who are meant to be the American counterparts. The were instead instead the tailoring business there an alcohol. You think the movie is going to be the Kingswood working on the statesmen side by side in.

Is and it isn’t the marketing has very much prioritized Channing Tatum as Tichina, he’s barely even in the movie is basically an extended gastro. There’s a real waste of having that actor in it. And the same goes for Jeff Bridges. You think that at some point he’s going to do something cool or something outrageous, know his entire role is behind a desk. It’s why he cast these big name actors. If you’re not going to use them properly, it just ends up being distracting.

In Channing Tatum case, he spends the second half of the movie literally all nice. And it does seem like the reason that is, is that some characters, they wanted to do something. Then they realized they didn’t want to do it with that character. And so they made another character. And that’s really what I the impression that I got with whiskey and tequila in the two characters feel a bit interchangeable. And it’s a real waste because they established a lot of things with these characters that they never really followed through on, because you have things like tequila being set up as the statesman’s counterpart to excel and you think that they’re going to, you know, sort of have this antagonistic relationship towards each other, know that that never really pays off into anything properly, fully fledged.

You think that Mark Strong’s Merlin is going to have this romantic relationship with Ginger because they spend so much time together in the movie? And it seems there were hints that they might have filmed a couple of scenes where lean in that direction, but then the movie doesn’t do that properly. It just feels like they could have just concentrated these characters and not spread them so thin rather than having lots of different supporting players. Just have one or two or maybe make the statesman feel more pivotal in what supposed to be a movie relatively focused around them and at least partially set in America, the one that actually gets the most screen time out. The statesman is Pedro Pascal. He is quite impressive in this movie. I wasn’t really familiar with the actor beforehand, but he really sounds in this role because all the statesmen have this cowboy like aesthetic. Pascal leans into that a lot and he’s really got a lot of charisma. You can understand why you sort of focus on that character in particular. And again, I wish that they’d kind of exploited that a bit more, especially because he has quite a cool weapon.

He likes to use a lasso, again, Western theme, but his version is a laser so it can cut people in half. That is a really fun gimmick. And I would have thought the movie would have a little bit more fun with that idea. But again, it’s one of those things, oh, let’s give him a laser lasso. Let’s only allowed to use it on a couple of occasions. Which brings us to the villain, Poppy, played by Julianne Moore, who is having a whale of a time in this part playing this smiling, personable, sadistic villain. It’s clear they were aiming for something in the same ballpark as Valentine. I don’t think it’s better than that character for reasons that I’ll get to. But as far as Moore herself goes, she’s having so much fun. She’s in these ruins that she’s gaudily redecorated with 50s style Americana. So you got this salon diner and this theater and she’s got robot dogs and giving people bionic arms. The fact that she’s enjoying herself so much perhaps makes up for the fact that the villains motivations in an actual scheme in general don’t really hold up to a lot of scrutiny. To be perfectly frank, her basic flaw is that because she’s taken over the drug empire, the entire world, she controls all of it. She holds the entire world to ransom because she is laced those drugs with a virus. And you just think to yourself, hang on a minute.

So you’re affecting your supply chain on you, effectively holding yourself to ransom. It doesn’t really seem like the idea has been entirely thought through to agree to a certain extent. And the movie tries to kind of pass that off as, oh, she’s psychotic. Well, that doesn’t really cure all levels. So we have this plot going on. And this involves the president, Playboy, Bruce Greenwood and his adviser Fox, played by Emily Watson. Again, these characters are really just introduced halfway into the movie all of a sudden. And it’s clear Greenwood is meant to be this amalgamation of various kind of presidents. So so obviously, there’s a lot of Trump in that performance, if I can say that. But there’s also a fair bit of Bush. There’s a bit of Reagan in there. It’s clear it’s meant to be this commentary on America’s approach to the drug war. And that’s one of the elements that does kind of work in this film because there is actually a bit of edge to it. So you end up with this tug of war between two characters that have quite sinister agendas in their own way. I don’t think the movie really helps its case by referencing the original and Valentine in that she’s managed to use what happened in that film as a way of kidnapping Elton John for her own personal gain. And that’s an idea. The first is really very funny, especially because Elton John is cursing up a storm and he’s really game for it.

But as the movie continues and he realizes that this isn’t just a cameo, it’s a full on supporting role for Elton John, the gag does sort of wear thin after a while, especially because Elton John starts breaking the fourth wall towards the end of the movie and you go, OK, I think you’ve overplayed your hand on this gag. And I know I spent a lot of time complaining about this movie, but I didn’t hate it. There were things that I liked about it. And every so often I would be reminded of things about the original Kingsmen that I did enjoy. The problem is, is that the movie kept reminding me that it wasn’t matching up to the Secret Service because it kept playing back. All the best moments of that movie again falls into another sequel, trap of doing constant callbacks to itself. I get it. I remember those things about the first movie. That’s why I’m seeing the sequel. I don’t need to see reiterations or reminders of one here in the first place. I don’t need a callback to the pub scene in the first movie. I don’t need to have phone replays of the most memorable scenes from the first film. I remember them the first time around and that becomes a bit of an issue because a lot of the movie feels like it’s going to remember this. Remember this?

I know it was two years ago. It wasn’t that long ago.

If it does feel a little bit self-congratulatory in that regard. But in those moments aside, the actual recurring elements do still work. Tannishtha is still a massively likable lead. This is the role that really made him a star overnight. And I think, like Firth, he embodies a lot of the qualities that makes Kingsman a success with audiences in that. Yeah, he’s a little bit cocky, he’s a bit cheeky, but he’s also got real heart. And so the movie doesn’t really offer him that much to really play this time out because there’s no huge character arc here. He does get a little bit of one to play in. He’s trying to deal with this spy life, but he has to deal with the demands of it all on his relationship because he’s in he’s still he’s still continuing on with the princess, the Swedish princess from the end of the first movie, although her participation in this film feels more like, oh, we have to keep this character around because we got a bit of stick to the joke at the end of the first movie. But again, that’s another character that just weighs down the movie. And I don’t really know if I was really fully invested in that relationship, to be perfectly honest.

And he has great chemistry. Mark Strong, who is ever alive, was always this was a vaun regular, having appeared not just Kingsman, but also kick ass and Stardust. And really, I think that the action sequences they do deliver a lot of the time. I don’t think that crises bloody or as kinetic as the first film, in spite of the fact that Vaughn does maybe overuse the single continuous take and they do try and go bigger and grander in them and they do still work. I do think that if you’re going for this movie, you simply don’t have these outrageous action sequences in the first film delivered. You get a lot more of that. It is a shame, though, the movie doesn’t really have a proper calling card like the first film did. Yeah, it doesn’t try to replicate the church sequence, which is probably a good thing, really, because, you know, an obvious attempt to try and copy that would have blatantly fell on its face. But even with that said, it’s missing that big moment. Even the climax of the first film had the the the activation switch sequence, which was Métro in of itself.

And there’s there’s nothing like that. There’s nothing shockingly funny about that in this movie. Unfortunately, there’s a couple of things where they do try and go for something like that, but they don’t quite get there. Sadly, it’s it’s lacking that sort of surprise. The first film or maybe it’s just lacking that sort of invention of the first movie to really capitalize on that kind of moment. And I think that really kind of sums this up in that it brings back a lot of elements that made the first film work. And they still do here to an extent, but it’s just missing that certain spark. I think if you’re a fan of the original movie, you like it. It really depends on your tolerance for the script and whether you can look past the fact there is this big tangent, heavy hodgepodge of ideas that haven’t been fully formed.

If you just go into it expecting this big cartoonish Otey spy romp, you’ll probably have a good time with this. In spite of your misgivings, I think this will be a quite polarizing sequel in a lot regards. It’s just that we have seen this movie done before and quite frankly, they did it perfectly well the first time around with Kingsman The Secret Service. It just feels like this one is in a suit that’s been very sloppily assembled and needs to be, you know, needs to be cleaned up just a little bit. It’s lacking its manners. Kingsman The Golden Circle does the typical sequel fumbling, trying to do more of what you liked about the first Benza overstuffed and overindulgent. There’s far too many characters and storylines fighting for attention that the film doesn’t really anchor itself in the way that the original ChAFTA spy transformation did and ends up wasting many members of its cast. The statesmen in particular, end up getting the short shrift, with Bridges and Tatum being sidelined for most of the film. That’s not to say the Charnley original doesn’t surface, especially wants Firth reappears despite the credibility stirring explanation and Ashton’s from a good value. But it strove to match it despite some kinetic action scenes. And the tone leans too broad, particularly Elton John’s extended gastro. There’s nothing to like if you’re a fan the first, but this. Kingsman needs to learn some discipline. If you want this review, my patron is tailored for you because you can see my reviews early, among other perks. But until next time. I’m Matthew Buck.

Fading out man is making the main. You know what that means.