Kingsman: The Golden Circle

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. (2017-09-21)

I still like it, but it finally gets going somewhere in the middle (not even thanks to the action scene), then it trots elegantly to the inevitable conclusion. It's still true that Vaughn can serve action on a silver platter without seams, but it's a pity that his provocations no longer have such balls. Only Elton John, who thoroughly did a lot of coke and is fighting for his life, but it’s still not as good as Kingsman: The Secret Service... (2017-12-19)

Kingsman is one of my favourite movies ever, but the sequel is a disappointment. Usually with sequels they add more of everything that was good in the first one, here it's the opposite. There's less action, blood, humour, and the pacing has slowed down, which were the four basic elements that the first one had. The film starts with an excellent car chase and then we wait an hour and a half for an action scene, which is a hell of a long time. I liked the action scene in the bar, which recalls the first episode, and then the half hour finale, which has a decent pace and fixes the impression of the previous hour, but lacks something that would be equal, for example, the church scene from the first one. I loved Pedro Pascal, he steals all the action for himself with Las, Halle Berry is also nice and the character of the president is awesome. I didn’t like the uninteresting Julianne Moore, who was absolutely not suitable for villain, she is not Samuel L. Jackson, but then I don't trust female villains too much, and her robot dogs seemed a bit too much for me. Overall, still over the top and stylish fun with very creative and modern direction by Matthew Vaughn, but it didn't have enough ideas to match the first one in my opinion anymore. I'd love to see a spin off with the Statesmen. 75%. (2017-09-21)

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. (2017-12-05)

Excellent fun carrying on riding the wave of part 1, pushing it to greater extremes, which sometimes is a shame, but you will easily forgive the Kingsmans. Vaughn again delivers us imaginative action, this time with a robotic arm and a jump-rope (pardon, lasso), a genius car chase in the taxi at the beginning. Again he successfully created an original idea about a villain wanting to redeem the world (I not talking about Poppy here) and the president is really cool. The eyesore of the movie in the form of a Cambodian temple with a retro bistro makes for an interesting setting. In acting terms, it takes no chances. Sometimes I have the feeling that some movies were made especially for me, and the Kingsmans are certainly one of them. See you in Sweden. (2017-09-20)