

Kingsman: The Golden Circle Review
Kingsman: The Golden Circle is your vintage sequel, a bigger, dumber and less-good reiteration of the original that, despite a ridiculous length—almost two and a half hours—and some pretty cheesy special effects that ruin a couple action scenes, manages to be moderately fun, if instantly forgettable.
The movie begins in pretty poor fashion with an over-the-top car chase that might have been good had returning director Matthew Vaughn and crew not executed it so poorly. Vaughn has never shown much interest in realistic visual effects, and the Kingsman films thus far have shown a propensity for larger than life moments, but some of the visuals and corresponding action scenes are so bad here that it’s impossible to get into them. Why should I be expected to be on the edge of my seat when nothing I’m watching looks even remotely real?
Kingsman: The Golden Circle recovers from there, especially once Julianne Moore is introduced as a seemingly pleasant psychopath. You get don’t see Moore in too many movies where truly anything goes, and The Golden Circle gives her full license to be ridiculous and the end result is glorious.
The rest of the movie—and there is a lot of it—plods along more or less as you’d expect, with Taron Egerton returning as Eggsy, a serviceable protagonist who is aided by the unlikely return of Colin Firth, whose character was shot in the head in the last movie. The Golden Circle coughs up plenty of fun moments, but the moments never form to make anything particularly memorable or exception. A movie like this has absolutely no reason to be longer than two hours, or even anywhere close, so Vaughn’s inability to tighten and edit this film accordingly speaks to the general abandon the film embraces.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle isn’t the dumpster fire some had said it was—if you’re looking for mindless entertainment and some okay action-comedy, you could do worse—but aside from Julianne Moore’s villainous turn, the movie doesn’t make a great argument as to why this franchise should continue.
Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.