Kingsman: The Golden Circle: More Silver Than Gold

Every once in a while, a movie comes out that just surprises everyone.  In 2015 that movie was Kingsman: The Secret Service.  It had everything: Humor, heart, action, and so many other things that make great movies, well, great.  Fast forward two years and now we have a new Kingsman movie, The Golden Circle.  Does the sequel have the magic the first one had?  Or does it suffer from sequel-itis?  That's what I'm here to tell you.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is directed by Matthew Vaughn and stars Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, and Mark Strong.  The Kingsman's base has just been destroyed and now they must go to the U.S. to team up another spy organization to take down a common enemy.  With that out of the way let's dive in!

I have some bad news.  This movie isn't as good as the first one.  That's fine though!  The Golden Circle is still an awesome, kick-ass movie.  Like in the previous installment, the performances here are extremely well done.  Colin Firth and Taron Egerton have amazing chemistry, as does a majority of the cast.  Pretty much everybody here does fantastic.  The action (which is non-stop by the way) has that same energetic, exciting feel that the first one had.  I give major props to the director for this.  Matthew Vaughn has such a unique take on filming these sequences.  They feel cartoon-y, yet realistic at the same time.  The tone of this movie has been debated about for a little bit.  Many critics felt it was off-putting, since the first one had a blend of tones.  I didn't mind it because in the first one, we follow Eggsy's journey to becoming a Kingsman ( which is a British spy organization.  I should've brought that up sooner).  A majority of that film was building up to that.  When The Golden Circle starts, he's been doing this for a while, so we don't need to see the build-up.  In addition to great action sequences and a fun vibe, the music in this movie is awesome.

Even though I did enjoy this movie quite a bit, there are some flaws.  If you're expecting a lot of Channing Tatum, I hate to say it, but you're going to be disappointed.  He's barely in it.  I heard somewhere that the original cut was over four hours long, so maybe his scenes were included there.  That being said, he does an awesome job.  Do you remember how I said most of the cast does a great job?  The one exception was Julianne Moore.  She seems like she's in a completely different movie.  Even though this film does have a cartoon-like vibe, she plays it up way too much.  There were some parts I was actually cringing a little.  In the beginning of the film, a lot of things moved too quickly ( I can't really say what because that's spoiler territory.  Once the movie was about a half- hour to forty-five minutes in, it finally found it's stride.  One thing that irked me a little was that there were a little too many similarities to the first one, particularly the bad guy's plan (again, I'm not going to elaborate because it's a spoiler).  Also, I would highly recommend NOT watching any of the trailers because they give way too much away.  There's a certain character that everyone thought was dead and in the first trailer, ta-da they showed him.  This is more marketing's fault than the the movie's.  Even the director was mad.

To sum everything up, Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a really fun movie.  It may suffer from an over-the-top performance and some pacing issues in the beginning, but I feel that the action and performances far outweigh the negatives.  I'm looking for to seeing where this franchise goes after this.  If I were to rate it, I'd give Kingsman: The Golden Circle an 8/10.