We did actually go and see Kingsmen: The Golden Circle, last night. And it is everything you would expect from the Kingsmen. Only this time it was terribly British Gentlemen working with amazingly Stereotypical Cowboys.
Remember the first Kingsman movie in which Galahad firkin tore up a Westborough Baptist Expy Church and the camera had these weird fixed points of stability? I call that "Dizzy Cam". Well, the people who made Kingsmen recognised that that one scene was so fucking awesome and loved.
So of course they used the Dizzy Cam about four or fifteen times in this movie, thus diluting the awesomeness to "What? Again?" status.
People. Camera tricks like Dizzy Cam or the Dolly Zoom are like chocolate sprinkles. They can make the cake that is your film be special, but you can't make a cake entirely out of chocolate sprinkles1.
The maximum number of fuck-that-was-awesome Dizzy Cam shots should be two, so you can build it up, raise the tensions, and make the audience go "FUCK YEAH!"
By the big jungle fight at the climax, all the gloss had gone off the Dizzy Cam and it was just... motion sickness and explosions.
Top marks for Elton's Bullet-time ninja kick, though. I know how much CGI went into that noise and it was fucking seamless. Ten outta ten.
Now onto the shitty things.
Representation
Apparently a relentless spy nonsense romp can't have two women in major roles in it at the same time. Yes, they flipped the Bond Bird by having a love interest from the previous movie being an ongoing relationship in the second... BUT.
She was once again damselled to provide manpain for our hero.
AND... The strong female agent from Kingsmen got killed in the first act so we could have Halle "Cardboard" Berry as both the Token Black and the Token Woman for the movie.
AND... The latino agent turned out to be a double agent all along.
AND... They're still buying into the whole "deformed people are evil" trope with the badass prosthetic villain's flunky having a robot arm. While cool, I'd like for one of the heroes to have these options, please.
AND... the baddie of this film is an older woman who is in love with a bygone age? Holding up the whole '50s housewife' gender role whilst simultaneously running an enormous drug cartel with a plan to take over the world by holding all the addicts for ransom.
Said Big Bad literally never gets her hands dirty. She has robots and flunkies to do all the nastiness like she has absolutely no agency at all.
And, once again, the US Prez is in the Badguy Box, planning to let the 'evil' drug addicts go hang in a completely casual disregard for human life. Interesting that they picked someone who more resembled Regan than the current Prez like they did in the last movie.
If they pull this shit again for a third one [and I'm betting money on a third one] then I can safely assume that this bullshit is an agenda and decide whether the humorousness of the Spy Romp justifies the terrible Sexism, Racism, and Ableism inherent in the subtext.
Also, if they keep bloody destroying the Kingsmen, I'm going to start wondering where they dredge up all these highly trained Gentlemen from.
Yes, I recognise that you can sit your arse down and eat an entire firkin bag of chocolate sprinkles, but it's still not a cake, fuckface. ↩