Kingsman: The Golden Circle

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%. (21/09/2017)

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. (21/09/2017)

Kingsman goes America! Given the stupidity of its premise and particular details reminiscent of Wild Wild West, this movie is surprisingly high-quality fun. Epic locations, stellar casting, a fast pace, a shitload of filmmaking ideas and especially witty pop-culture references, proving Matthew Vaughn’s intelligence and ability to reflect the current state of society and audience tastes. (02/10/2017)

I already had problems with the first Kingsman (I thought it was teenage nonsense that doesn’t know the limits of good taste), so it’s no surprise that the sequel didn’t pull me into the cinemas. Actually, I should rate it lower than I am, because it’s clearly weaker than the previous one. But I really don’t give a toss. The Golden Circle is such an uninteresting film that it didn’t even manage to piss me off. Sad. For a moment, I also wanted to complain about how weirdly and poorly the antagonist is drawn, but then I realised that I don’t remember even who was the villain in the first one (and I still can’t recall it!). But I will remember Julianne Moore, so I’ll leave my complaints for another time. :D (21/09/2017)

In his first sequel, Vaughn had a unique opportunity to play with the "rules" and vices of the sequel, just as he had in the past with fairy-tale, comic, and bond rules. But instead of addressing them, he made fun of them and took advantage of them, so he is slightly defeated by "sequel illness". The result is a film suffering from all the maladies of the sequel, namely more of everything, bigger, longer, more grandiose, more populated, crazier, more excessive and ... And as a result less entertaining (not to be confused with not entertaining). Mainly because the concept did not level up, the length is unjustified, the joke with Elton is repeated until it becomes annoying, Julianne is excellent, but detached from all interaction with others. It is too excessive this time to work as an (almost) regular Bond movie (which the first movie managed to balance), the original characters do not develop at all, there are no emotions except for "Merlin´s singing" sequence and most of the new characters are caricatures without any hint of personality. Does that mean that Vaughn lost his driving force, his ideas and made a pointless average movie? No, it doesn´t. He's a way too good director to do that, and the cast which clearly enjoys it helps him a lot, but the movie is very close to the above-mentioned. (20/09/2017)