Kingsman: The Golden Circle CS Review

I had gone to see this film with high expectations after the first film, but this film pretty much fell right into the territory of sequels that don't deliver.

The Golden Circle cast includes Taron Egerton, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Mark Strong, Channing Tatum, Colin Firth, Elton John, & Edward Holcroft. It's co-written and directed by Matthew Vaughn. It runs two hours and 21 minutes, which put it into the feeling like it was a way too long of a movie realm.

Light spoilers ensue, including this casting spoiler:

OH, if you're a Channing Tatum fan, don't get your hopes up. He's got about 10 or so minutes of screen time total. Any marketing with him in it, kind of equates to bullshit marketing to snag Tatum's demographic fans. Almost his entire appearance in the film is encapsulated in the trailers for the film.

Channing Tatum stuff on Amazon.

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The film opens with some action, fills up with some slapstick comedy, then ends with a huge action piece

Events in the film take place a year after the first film where we see that Eggsy has taken Harry’s place in the Kingsman organization and he’s secretly shacking up with the butt sex princess he saved from the last film (Hanna Alström).

The opening action sees Eggsy getting ambushed by a Kingsman washout with a bionic arm. It's an epic Kingsman action scene but after defeating his enemy, Eggsy leaves the bionic arm of his enemy in the car, and the arm starts hacking the car's computers and the Kingsman network.

This information leads to a lot of missile strikes on agents homes and their headquarters.

After wiping out the Kingsman, our evil Golden Circle crew delivers a lethal disease worldwide, via their network of recreational drug dealing crews. They use the disease to negotiate a ransom from the President of the United States. But, this president, played by Bruce Moore has bigger plans, because while he pretends to negotiate with the Circle, he's starting to add up his win-win situation. If he lets all the drug users die, this would kill off these kinds of criminals, and would also undermine The Golden Circle’s business base. He thinks this will help him win his war on drugs and look really good.

After the missile attacks Eggsy and Merlin (Strong) go into hiding so they can figure out what they need to do from this point forward. And of course, with contingency plans in place, they learn that they have American counterparts, The Statesmen!

With their help, they hunt down Poppy (Moore), the head of the Circle.

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The Golden Circle starts off with an action-based bang but then takes quite a while to set things in motion. The first act was pure set up, the second act was a journey of sorts while the third act branched out into twists and surprises as the good guys take on the bad guys.

The problem for me was that after the first film, this film dropped the ball in some spots while making other things too over-the-top. For example, the Statesmen are all ramped up cowboy secret agents, drawls and all.

Not to mention, it started getting predictable at times.

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The first Kingsman was a fresh face of fun as we learned about Eggsy and the secret agent group, but this sequel was just a ramped up, glorified excuse to make another film and populate it with inexplicable "humor" like planting a bugging device in a woman's (you know what), because that's the only place it will work. There were evil henchmen eating burgers of recently ground up peers, a shit-load of f-bombs. (Oh, sorry)

Then there's the way that the Statesmen managed to revive Harry, despite taking a bullet through the brain.

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Juliane Moore played a great part as a drug lord who has to hide her business success because of all those pesky, legal ramifications.

Elton John was hilarious and the life of the party at times.

As a movie in the theater, I hated that I wasted my time and money. But when it comes to TV, I'm sure it will pan out just perfectly for FX or TNT.

For once, I agree with Rotten Tomatoes and surprisingly, disagree with IMDb.

RT: 51%, IMDb: 7.1/10.

The only thing that will make this film redeemable for me is IF Honest Trailers gets a hold of it. But of late, I'm not even sure they can improve my attitude about it.

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