Kingsman: The Golden Circle Review

Kingsman: The Secret Service was one of those rare movies that turns out to be a pleasant surprise. It looked like it was going to be a dumb, goofball parody of a Bond movie, and the studio buried it in the winter months, which means they probably agreed. And yet, it turned out to be a really enjoyable send-up of the spy movie genre that worked just as well on its own as it did as a parody. It had a great sense of humor and some fantastically inventive action sequences, and pretty much everybody loved it. Naturally any movie that turns into a sleeper hit like that gets a sequel, and so now we have The Golden Circle.

Sequels tend to make me nervous because they're tricky things to pull off, and most movies that get them really don't need them because they've told a self-contained story with character arcs that are finished at the end. So coming back for more usually involves ham fisted reasons to simply repeat everything you saw in the last movie. It ends up just being more of the same, which as we all know tends to get old quickly.

Kingsman, on the other hand, seemed like it had the potential to be a franchise. While it did have a self-contained story, it set up a universe and a character that could continue to evolve if the people making it were clever. Since they had already delivered a movie that demonstrated they were, I was hoping they'd find a way to build a sequel that didn't succumb to the "more, bigger, louder" impulse.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Let's talk about how Kingsman: The Golden Circle became everything Kingsman parodied before and a bit of a bait and switch to boot:

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