Kingsman 2 review- a film critique by Chris Stuckmann

Full text transcript of Kingsman 2 review:

Kingsman The Golden Circle is once again directed by Matthew Vaughn coming off of his sequel, Kingsman The Secret Service, a film that really surprised me, took me off guard. I didn’t expect it to be that good. It was really entertaining, kind of insane and really audacious and in-your-face, and I liked pretty much everything about it. So naturally I was excited for another journey into this world. Taryn Edgerton once again plays the young recruits of the Kingsmen Secret Service. And this time around, Julianne Moore, queen of the drug trade, is holding the world hostage, having inserted a terrible virus into virtually every popular drug. So the king’s men have to team up with the statesmen of America Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, to go against Julianne Moore and her empire of virus inducing drugs. So, I mean, it sounds good, right? It’s pretty crazy. It wouldn’t make sense for me to go into the sequel to Kingsman expecting something that wasn’t insane. The first movie was so over the top and enjoyably so that I was hoping for a similar experience the second time around. But this does suffer in some ways from trying to put way too many things into one movie. Sometimes a sequel tries to be bigger and better, so they go for a better villain or more action sequences or more special effects. This film, oddly, chooses to have so much more in regards to the subplot area. There are so many different things that occur in this film that take characters from point A to point B with the goal of getting them eventually to point Z.

And instead of just having a logical reason to get to a place, they use all these convoluted methods to get characters to go, places like they were trying to find a location. And so they have to go to this big concert and two men have to try to seduce a woman to get a tracker inside her so that they can follow her to wherever this base is. And it’s this big, elongated sequence that feels so unnecessary. And this film, unfortunately, falls into mini scenes like that. It’s very long. It’s like two hours and twenty one minutes. And when the action comes, it’s exciting, it’s loud, it’s visually appealing. But so much of the in-between stuff feels like baggage and the film becomes kind of boring at times. This was a disappointing movie for me. It has a lot of the things that I liked about the first, namely its subversiveness, its irreverence, but it doesn’t have anything that made it feel fresh. I like Julianne Moore quite a bit as the villain. She was giving a very fun performance. Her character, however, and the way the script uses her was strange. She is constantly separated from everything. She’s at this jungle 1950s diner style hideout. That’s not really a hideout at all. She’s literally created an oasis of 1950s nostalgia in the middle of the jungle. Anybody could find her. She’s surrounded this area by mines. She has robot dogs and a very famous singer that has some of the funnier parts in the movie at her disposal at all times. And they keep her there through the entire film.

So her menace is entirely brought about by whoever happened to do some drugs that may be one of our lead characters cares about who could die from this virus. And as a villain, she is very, very weak. And it’s often said that a movie is only as strong as its antagonist. And in this case, that’s true. She is giving a very fun and likable performance. And I thought she was really good in the movie. But as a character, she had no menace at all. And I just didn’t find myself all that concerned with our heroes this time around. Taryn Edgerton is really good as Colin Firth is great once again. Mark Strong’s really good. Channing Tatum is entertaining. Everyone’s doing fine. There isn’t like a weak link when it comes to the performances. You can tell that everyone is really trying to make a good movie. And the biggest praise that I can give this film is the cinematography. We’ll talk about the cinematography and the action sequences. But aside from that conversation, scenes, location, photography of sets and places they visit the one perfect shot. Twitter is going to have a ball when this movie comes out on Blu ray because it’s really well shot. Everything looks perfectly symmetrical. It’s a really beautiful looking film. Let’s talk about those action sequences while they are kind of visually appealing, this one went really far with using CGI to stitch shots together to make it all look like one unbroken take. And sometimes it can get very jumpy and jittery and it just doesn’t feel like you’re watching something that’s actually happening.

It feels like you’re watching this really cool video game sequence that was set up to look as impossibly entertaining as they could make it. But that’s kind of the feeling I got from so many of the action sequences. The first one, as I said, was super over-the-top and it really went for that. This one, I think, suffers from having just too much they’re trying to do. They’re really, really going for like the superhero sequences that make no real sense. We’re like human beings are catapulting all over the place and doing these insane moves. And it just kind of lost me. After a while. I had fun with this movie. Overall, I don’t think it’s awful. I think that it is disappointing and that from a story perspective, they should have cut out so much. But the performances and the overall fun vibe of the movie makes it perfectly watchable. It’s just a disappointment when you compare it to the first one. And like I said, they really should have cut out a lot. I’m going to give Kingsman the Golden Circle AC guys, thank you so much, as always, for watching. We’re going to have a ton of reviews this week. I have lots of catching up to do. I have friend request Lego Ninjago Movie. I want to see Brad’s status. I want to see stronger. I have a lot of stuff to do, guys. Thank you very much as always. And if you like this, you can click right here and get Stutman.