Review of Kingsman 2- by Ralph the Moviemaker

Full text transcript of the review of Kingsman 2:

Kingsmen and the Golden Circle or the Golden Circle or something, it’s a sequel to a movie called Kingsman The Secret Service. I guess we’ll talk about that movie first since I’ve never talked about it. I like that movie a lot. It’s a modern day spoof on spy movies while at the same time putting its own spin on it.

Matthew Vaughn is, of course, the guy who made kick ass and he’s made one of the greatest movie ever made. I can’t remember the name of it, but it has a Michelle Pfeiffer as a witch. That movie’s awesome. But if you’ve seen any of his movies, you know, he has a very distinct style, lots of sweeping camera shots, lots of loud music and fighting and blood and gore, except for the witch movie that he made. And Kingsman incorporates all of these elements. It parodies spy movies and on top of it all, has really phenomenal action scenes that are gruesome but not too gruesome to where it becomes disturbing. It’s fun, campy violence, kind of like a Tarantino thing. And you got really great performances and really fun characters. And it there’s, of course, the guy who plays, except he’s not great. But you know what? He’s an up and comer underdog character who has to learn to become a spy after being like a gangster, a British gangster for all these years. You got a strong female character. You got Mark Strong, who’s funny in it. You got Colin Firth, who’s fantastic in it and has the best action scene maybe ever. And then you got Sam Jackson, who plays an amazing villain, very against type. He has the plan of a Bond villain. He has the kind of persona of a Bond villain, but he hates violence. And he had the little lisp, which just adds to his character so much. He’s playing not only a parody of these James Bond evil villains that are over the top, he’s going against his usual casting as Sam Jackson. Sam Jackson always plays Sam Jackson, basically, and that he actually plays a character, great joy.

But nothing beats to cheeseburgers. I would think with all the great 45 would be a classic pairing.

Imagine Twinkies and the 1937 Chateau ICAM for Pudding.

I like it. So now we are Kingsmen and the Golden Circle or things, the Golden Circle, whatever it’s called.

And there is a few components that were key to the success of Kingsman that are already missing. First, there is no Colin Firth and the trailer. They put Colin Firth in there because people want to see Colin Firth because he’s the best part and sadly, he is not utilized in this film that much. We will go into that later, though. Another thing missing is, of course, Sam Jackson, who him and Colin Firth basically made the movie. And the third thing you have is this kind of sweet underdog story about a young British gangster becoming a badass spy, becoming the James Bond type. And at the end, he gets the girl and he saves the day and it’s over the top. And it’s silly and it’s goofy, but it’s fun. It’s fun. And there is this great satirical edge to it. And there are lots of really funny jokes, lots of smart and unique action scenes and lots of appropriate style. I watched it a few months ago and it’s so good movie. It’s not great. It’s not a masterpiece, so don’t expect that. But it’s certainly much better than this. So now Kingsmen and the Golden Circle, I guess let’s go through a few good things first before I let my fucking rage out.

I think on a purely technical level, there are some good shots in this movie. I think there’s some fun action stuff. Toward the beginning, there was a car chase. They show a little bit of it in the trailer. And I thought that was neat. It was a little confusing at times, a little over the top. But it’s Caseman. It’s supposed to be over the top. I forgave it. There is a great action scene at the end that is ruined by horrible music.

Probably won’t get into it.

That’s a whole other thing in terms of how it was shot. It was cool. OK, so there are the compliments I have for it. It’s it’s very few compliments, but that’s. This movie, which I was extremely looking forward to and which already had such a place in my heart to be like, you know what? Be forgiving of this. It’s a fun spy movie. And you love spy movies and you love fun movies, I, I struggle to find anything I liked about it. I thought this movie was absolutely horrible. And basically every way I thought the music was fucking terrible, I thought the song choices for action scenes were terrible. I thought all the action scenes lacked weight. All of the performances here are bad. All of the characters are one note and predictable and poorly acted. The villain sucks. The heroes suck. Colin Firth has nothing to do. Holly Berry has nothing to do. Some of the best characters from the last film are killed off for no reason. The only one I think was trying was Mark Strong. I think he was trying to make this movie work and he even he wasn’t very good. So I guess we got to go through. I don’t even know where to start. Honestly, I. I really hated this movie. I hated it from start to end.

I thought it was the most pandering, obvious, cheap, lazy piece of shit.

So let’s start with the comedy. So this this Kingsmen decides to go the route where we’re going to be so ridiculous that it’s funny. And it was like watching an Adam Sandler movie. There’s this movie Adam Sandler was and my friend told me about where he plays a spy or something. And I can imagine it’s probably just like Kingsmead Golden Circle. The jokes in here are so bad, it’s like an eight year old wrote them. It’s like an eight year old wrote this script. The plot doesn’t make any fucking sense at all. Characters have nothing to do and the humor is just a horrible and juvenile. The running joke of this movie is Elton John is in it.

Julianne Moore kidnapped Elton John and Elton John plays music and he dresses up silly in it. And he plays piano for Julianne Moore in every scene she’s in. And she has ten scenes, 10 scenes of this character that only needed maybe two scenes to explain who she was.

And she’s not nearly as interesting as Sam Jackson and Kingsmen. And and she just spends her whole time in this one location, this horrible fifty seems like drug cartel headquarters. It doesn’t make any sense why it’s fifties themed. And again, it’s just Elton John. Elton John keeps showing up. Elton John, I swear to God, has more to do in this movie than Colin Firth does. So if you’re a big fan of Elton John, then I highly recommend this movie because he’s probably the main character. He didn’t have jokes. He didn’t tell jokes. His joke was, look, it’s Elton John. And then there’s this scene where Elton John kicks someone in the face and he looks in the camera like, oh, look, it’s Elton John. Isn’t it funny? And it’s like, no, what’s the joke? Here is the joke that Elton John kicked someone and he’s dressed like a peacock. OK, great. All of the wit, all of the city, the satirical edge of Kingsmen, which is what made it so unique, is completely missing in this movie. I can see the comments right now, Ralph. I know this movie doesn’t make any sense and the plot is stupid and it has horrible cliche lines of dialogue that feel like they’re written by a five year old. But Kingsman is self-aware. They know that they’re making fun of spy movies and so they’re trying to emulate that same style. OK, that’s what the first one did. This movie does not do that at all. Instead of making fun of these elements, it just embraces them and does them just flat out with no wit or comedy to it. They just made a bad movie with a lazy script. And it’s full of cliches and it’s full of horrible one liners and it’s full of it’s just fucking I there’s so much wrong with the script here. I can’t even begin to explain every little thing. There are so many scenes where it just doesn’t work at all. There is a scene in this movie.

I hated the scene like every scene in this movie, but I hated this scene probably the third or fourth most, which gives you a sense of how many awful scenes there are in this movie.

So there is a scene in this movie where the main character has to go to some like Woodstock like concert and hook up with this girl.

So because this girl is the boyfriend of a guy who has a metal arm who works for Julianne Moore. So he what he has to do is put a tracker on.

That listens into her conversations and tracks wherever she goes, but the catch is the way to insert this tracking device into her is into her vagina. That’s the joke. So EXI has to have sex with this girl to to get the tracker into her and it goes nowhere. There is no joke in that scene. The joke is, oh, he has to have sex with her and he doesn’t want to because he has a girlfriend back at home. Can we talk about that too. So the woman from the last movie the Princesse had anal sex with at the end of Kingsman, you know, that character that was introduced like the last 10 minutes of the movie? She’s a major character in this movie. Exeunt her now dating. Why? I don’t know. I always took it as exi would be like this James Bond type character who has this, you know, other love interest throughout the whole thing. But he never really gets with her because he’s not ready to commit to a relationship. So we just kind of had sex with all these random women and one of them happened to be the princess of Sweden. And so the princess of Sweden is his girlfriend in this movie. And I thought it was funny at first, like, but no, they genuinely love each other in scenes that were not well developed at all. And he calls her when he’s about to have sex with this woman so that he can put a tracking device in her and calls his his girlfriend, the princess, and says, hey, honey, I’m going to have sex with a woman now because I need to put a tracking device in her. And you’re like, why are you calling her about this? Every decision the characters made were so dumb.

And again, people who want to defend this movie, I don’t know why they would all say, oh, well, the movie knew it was doing these silly things because it’s self-aware and it’s like, no, it wasn’t. It was just lazy. Colin Firth in this movie has amnesia. Yeah. That cliche to at least half of this movie. Colin Firth is doing nothing but just moping around in a room. He wants to study butterflies, apparently, instead of be the character, you know, that we know from the last one. And it’s not till halfway through where he decides he wants to be Colin Firth character from the original King’s again. And then even then, he does absolutely nothing. He doesn’t do any action stuff. That’s cool. He doesn’t have any funny lines of dialogue. He’s just nothing like most characters in this movie. They just do nothing. Haileybury in this movie is terrible. She has nothing to do. She says she’s the woman on the laptop who just types and goes like, you need to go here, you need to go here. Why did you get Haileybury for this role? Why is Jeff Bridges in this movie? Channing Tatum does nothing. His only action scene is fighting off Colin Firth and EXI for literally a minute. And that scene sucked. And then the rest of the movie, Channing Tatum has cocaine, apparently, and then it makes him sick and he goes in a freezing pot and that was it. So I guess I’m going to get the spoilers now. Don’t see this movie. I don’t feel bad about spoiling this at all. This is a terrible, terrible movie and you should not watch it. So the plot of the movie is Julianne Moore. What is the wants to be taken seriously as a businesswoman?

So she poisons all of the drugs in the world and says, Mr. President, you’re going to make all these drugs illegal, otherwise I’m going to kill everyone with the drugs I made. And then we get introduced to this great element, which is going to take a while to explain. The president of the United States is an evil man. He’s he’s a bad guy. He wants to kill everyone so that there is no more drug trading in America. Basically, he says, I’m just going to let Julianne Moore kill everyone because then all of the criminals will be defeated. And then his vice president, I assume, is his vice president is a woman who kind of looks like Hillary Clinton. And that’s when I knew this woman is going to be the president at the end of the movie. That’s what a really bad pandering movie would do. But that’s probably what they’re going to do. And sure enough, at the end of the movie, the evil president is foiled and the woman takes charge of the office and says, oh, the president is now impeached. So so what’s the point of that is this I really can’t even do justice to how pandering and stupid it was because it’s not even as if they’re making a political statement.

It’s just like, oh, the president’s evil. He wants to kill everyone in the country who does drugs, including the Hillary Clinton lookalike. If you’re sick at all, he tells you to go to the stadium and then they put you in a cage and they put like stack you on this, like, giant assembly line of cages and they keep you there just to die off because the president just wants you to die. I don’t mind. Well, actually, I do mind all these dumb movies trying to get political, but they have nothing to say. They just want to pander to a demographic of people. And it’s like, what point are you trying to make, Matthew Vaughn? Have you ever even been to America? Do you know what anything is like here? It doesn’t seem like he does, because also throughout this whole movie, the fact that the gimmick is in America, the American version of Kingsmen, we drink whiskey and we wear cowboy hats and we all have Southern accents and we all listen to the Western country music.

Welcome to statesmen, independent intelligence agency, American Cousins. How can I help Obama save the world situation?

Every action seen in this movie in the second half of this movie anyway, has some embarrassing, bad country music over it.

You’re ruining the only good scenes you have with terrible music.

It was so obvious, like, oh, these are Kingsmen, but they’re in America. So they have whips. They all talk like this. They all have Southern accents like this. The British Kingsmen aren’t portrayed in such like a radical cartoonish way. They’re they’re not fucking eating tea and crumpets every scene. They’re not like these ridiculous caricatures. They’re just guys who dressed in suits and act fancy because they’re classy. But Channing Tatum comes out with the cowboy boots and the cowboy hat and the leather jacket. No character has an arc. They don’t learn anything about each other, most of them, or just just in scenes scenes that mean nothing. Half of this movie can be cut out because half of these characters don’t serve a purpose at all. And then what’s worse, the only strong female character from the last movie is killed off in a scene that’s so uneventful here. Like, did you really just kill this important character? I it was so uneventful. I thought, oh, she’s going to come back later. But she didn’t. She just died and that was it. So this movie’s trying to put on this like, oh, look how progressive we are. We have this woman become the president after this evil president steps down. But every female character in this movie is a helpless victim and they don’t do anything to help or further the story along Berry in this does nothing. The vice president woman who becomes the president at the end does nothing.

She just she does cocaine and gets sick and then gets put in the cages by the Donald Trump lookalike, President White and Julianne Moore is this horrible, evil bitch with robot dogs. And then we get into the other problem with this movie. The visual effects in this movie are horrendous. Nothing feels real. All the action is so phony. And you could forgive it if it was at least fun. But you don’t like these characters and you’re not having a good time. So in the end, you just don’t care at all. She has two robot dogs and like a robot who works in the salon, who has a grenade launcher at the end of the movie, and she just gets blown up out of nowhere. I don’t know why Matthew Vaughn doesn’t realize this fighting robots is boring. I’d rather see Colin Firth plough through twenty guys rather than just fight one or two robot dogs. And of course, Colin Firth can’t defeat these robot dogs on his own. He needs Elton John to come in and and help kill the robot dogs. And they both take bowling balls and stomp the dog’s head in with the bowling balls. Does it does it sound like I’m describing a real movie? It sounds like a fucking joke. There are some comedy scenes that were OK like Mark Strong drinking. I don’t remember what was funny about it.

I just remember Mark Strong had a few funny lines because he was sad that his friends died in the Secret Service. But even the comedy does this movie in because first of all, it’s terrible, like I said, but they keep cutting to these comedy bits and these jokes or Elton John, you’ve got this really cool action scene going on. I mean, it’s not that cool, but it’s cooler than everything else in the movie. And then we just cut to Elton John doing some stupid shit or some character has a dumb one liner that’s like obvious and predictable and just like makes you fucking cringe and you’re. Home movies is cringe worthy. There is no tension throughout any of it and, you know, you know what’s going to happen in the movie. But still, I would like the characters to at least take this seriously. Everything in the first Kingsmen is ridiculous, but the characters themselves in the world they were in took it seriously. You see that their actions had consequences. Like at the end, when the virus breaks out and everyone’s killing each other, they have to save the world. And and it’s immediate. The danger is imminent. And then you cut to ex’s mother and they’re hiding in the bathroom as people are busting in.

And you see you have this emotional connection to the event. And in this, you just don’t care about anything because everyone’s a cartoon character. No one takes anything seriously. And half of this movie is horrible CGI. So there’s just you just don’t feel anything. Then we get into the direction. I don’t understand how how the guy who made kick ass can make a movie this fucking bad on basically every level. I don’t understand why he thought it would be a good idea to play horrible country music over these really cool action scenes and just ruin the scene. There are these pointless transitions that take up 20 seconds or 30 seconds of screen time where we cut from one location and then we zoom in and it fades into a forest and then the forest has to go all the way through into the, you know, the facility where the drug dealers are hanging out. And then we got a pan in through there and then pan through a window and then go through that and then go in this room and these fucking scenes go on forever. There is a shot where Channing Tatum and EXI are walking out of the of a distillery for whiskey or something and the camera goes back and it goes up and it goes this way and it goes across the field and it goes over the Kingsmen thing and then it goes into the ceiling and then it goes through a glass panel in the ceiling and it goes to an office. And then it’s like, why is this going on forever? This is so style over substance. The only reason these shots exist is because Matthew Vaughn went, oh, these shots look cool. There’s no reason for them. They don’t tell a story. It’s just like, oh, I could do it. So I did.

And it just eats away screen time, which could be spent either developing a character. I mean, God forbid they do that because whoever they got to write this movie is such a bad writer. Maybe it’s better to spend 30 seconds on a transition. You the dialogue in this was awful. On top of it, the movie starts and it’s just exi walking out of the Kingsmen building and then a guy is there with a robot arm and he’s like, oh I’m going to kill you now. He pulls out a gun and it’s like there was no setup or tension for any of this. While you’re just going to start the movie here, I’m struggling to even find everything wrong with it because there’s so much and it’s such a mess, as if everything I haven’t said so far didn’t turn you off. This movie is two and a half hours long, and it feels it because, again, it’s just characters doing things that don’t matter to the plot. Another scene of this character in a room with this character just talking about nothing. Then we got an action scene. Then we have a reference to the last movie. Oh, the fanservice in this this especially really kills is that it treats the first Kingsmen as if it’s like a global phenomenon, like, oh, we’re just going to redo scenes from the first Kingsmen and you’re all going to clap and laugh because you recognize that scene like it’s a Marvel movie or something. And it’s like Kingsman isn’t that big of a deal. You’re on your second movie. They redo the scene literally where Colin Firth says Manners maketh man.

You know what that means. And let me teach you a lesson.

One of the best scenes in the original Kingsmen. Now they just redo it, except Colin Firth messes up and then the guy from Narcos just kills them with a whip.

It’s a two out of 10. I really suggest you don’t see this movie. But if you do, I hope you see this, too, that it’s not it’s not matter. It’s not. Oh, look how clever we are. We are making fun of these old spy movies. It’s just a bad spy movie with all of the same cliches and lazy writing and predictability. I’m shocked that these talented people came together and this is what they came up with. I will never see Kingsman movie again, because if if it’s going to be like this from now on with just horrible pandering nonsense, I have no interest ever got, there is a lot more to get into.

While the visuals are impressive at times, so much to talk about. It’s mostly a rehash of the long enough. It also has a similar theme and elements like a corrupt government, turncoat drainers, etc. It also uses John Denver’s Country Road way too often. Plus, if you haven’t noticed, this song has been used a lot recently. Like Neil Young, I’ll do the fingering covid-19 Loganlea.