Kingsman: The Golden Circle bogged down by length, aimless plot

Taron Egerton in Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Image courtesy 20th Century Fox.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle gets off to about as brilliant of a start as a sequel can. Within two minutes the movie reestablishes its protagonist (Taron Egerton's spy Eggsy/Galahad), introduces his main rival (Edward Holcroft as Charlie), and launches into an entertaining car fight sequence scored by Prince's Let's Go Crazy. The sequence works marvelously, a fun and exciting way of getting the audience involved immediately into the action, a testament to efficient and effective writing can do, aided greatly by director Matthew Vaughn's eye for a well executed fight scene.The movie is sprinkled with some quality action sequences; none quite as insane and addicting as the brutal battle royale Colin Firth engaged in at the church in the first Kingsman, but there remain a bevy of unique, well executed and crowd pleasing fights to appease the audience's desire. If it could have kept that pace, The Golden Circle would be a hell of an action movie with some fun spy elements in between.

Yet the movie can't sustain the pace it set in the opener. Even after literally blowing up the eponymous organization (save Mark Strong's Merlin) and introducing some Kentucky equivalents (Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal and Jeff Bridges), The Golden Circle loses itself to unwanted plot machinations that ultimately go nowhere and provide no incentive for the viewers to stick around. It's the downside to having what could be an action movie with a run time of nearly two and a half hours, as the audience is stuck wading through the some awkward sequences spliced together to resemble a plot, taking its sweet time to get to the fireworks factory. And what makes for a plot is not worth getting invested in, focusing on a crazed drug lord (admittedly a rather fun Julianne Moore) poisoning millions of people to legalize recreational drug use. Her wish is to leave her jungle fortress and move back to America a very, very wealthy woman, which is a less than captivating villainous motivation. She's vicious through the process, forcing henchmen to murder each other and threatening Elton John (a highlight) with (poorly rendered) robot dogs, but the reasons for her madness lack punch and interest, especially for a genre in which evil intentions are the key to so much success.

Somewhere within The Golden Circle, Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman have a point for what they're trying to say about legalizing drugs. It is in there, between Moore's dreams of returning home and the counterpoint of allowing millions of drug users to die for their sins, about some sort of middle ground between the two? Whatever that sweet spot between abandoning social mores for profit and allowing for the slaughter of millions of people, Vaughn and Goldman take aim for it. That they don't know exactly what they're targeting, or the reason why that point may be of value, isn't exactly a surprise in a movie that otherwise doesn't regard nuance as an important ingredient. (To be fair, lacking nuance not a knock against the film, just a state of being for the franchise.)

What's more frustrating is the return of Firth as Harry/the original Galahad. While having Firth around is always a pleasure, but his appearance in this movie undercuts one of the key emotional scenes in the first film, in which he gets shot in the face by Samuel L. Jackson and (supposedly) dies. How he survived between The Secret Service and The Golden Circle is asinine and a screenwriting cheat, enough to frustrate viewers into questioning whether or not any death in this movie's universe truly matters. It wouldn't be surprising if more characters killed in this movie wind up being not dead in the third installment for reasons. If there's nothing truly at stake, if characters can just show up again after death, than any emotional scenes lose their desired resonance.

The give and take with The Golden Circle is the blend of solid action sequences (and general charms of Firth, Strong and Moore) countered by the egregiously long run time and poor plot. Viewers have to sift through a lot of content to get to the parts where Vaughn shines, and the number of those moments are fewer and of a greater distance than they should be. When it's at its best, The Golden Circle provides enough of what viewers want in an action movie to maintain viewer excitement and showcase Vaughn’s chops as an action director. More often than not though the movie never reaches that benchmark.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 141 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Fans of the first movie and folks down for some charming British violence.

Take the whole family?: Yeah… this one gets a little bloody and gory. Keep the kids away.

Theater or Netflix?: Not much to see for a theater trip.

How involved is Channing Tatum in this movie?: Not as much as hoped. After popping by for a pretty fun fight scene at the start of the second act, Tatum spends much of the movie on ice. It's pretty disappointing considering how much fun the movie could be with him added to the fray; without him, things just aren't quite as interesting as they should be.

Watch this instead?: Watching the brilliant church scene from the first movie on YouTube is worth it. For media with a little more length, revisit the James Bond classic Goldfinger.

Sing consistently off-key

Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) in Sing. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Sing opens on a particularly illogical and nonsensical note and never rights its course, opting to run through more 108 minutes of crass jokes, flatulence jokes and an overabundance of Seth MacFarlane to end with something miles away from heartfelt. Sing isn't much of a film, yet it somehow doesn't cross into abhorrent or awful either; it's just annoyingly bad, too lazy and uninspired to do much more than exist and crank out pop music covered by famous actors and aspiring singers.

None of this is really all that surprising. The studio responsible for this, Illumination, is known for producing this type of fair. It has one solid film in Despicable Me and a whole mess of whatevers, including this summer's mediocre Secret Life of Pets. It's an uninteresting studio designed to make lower-budget animated films like Sing and earn a hefty profit in the process, rarely caring for artistic merit, good storytelling or sophisticated jokes. The studio never aspires to be Pixar, Disney, Studio Ghibli or even DreamWorks, although its films cost the same amount at the cinema as the films by the other four. Not every film is going to be Toy Story 3, Moana, My Neighbor Totoro, or Chicken Run, but you'd hope a studio would chuck in a modicum of effort into producing films. Illumination, however, doesn't seem too interested in actually doing something with its animation quality, plot or characters, hitting the proverbial notes as needed to create an overstuffed pile of meh. In a year with a pair of legitimately great animated films and a few OK ones, Sing is just there, waiting for the money to roll in from viewers with little else to do on a December afternoon.  

Usually a film like Sing has a clever idea or some promise that isn't fulfilled, a redeeming quality just under the surface to be positive about. That is very much not the case. The premise, about a collection of anthropomorphic regular folks (voiced by Scarlett Johansson as a porcupine, Reese Witherspoon as a pig, Tori Kelly as an elephant, Taron Egerton as a gorilla, Nick Kroll as another pig and the aforementioned MacFarlene as a mouse) competing in a talent competition run by Matthew McConaughey as a koala with bad business sense, isn't innovative or interesting on its own. Not a fatal flaw if the writers find something interesting to say about it, which they do not. Excluding a bizarre subplot involving MacFarlane's awful mouse wannabe lounge singer, the film never veers off the boring characters take their chance at stardom, doubt themselves, then rise up again to put on a whopper of a performance because that would require some thought and nuance, concepts this film prefers to avoid.

Well, technically the film does make a viewer think about the inane insanity of the film universe. Much of the soundtrack consists of covers of songs like Shake It Off, Call Me Maybe, My Way, Hallelujah, and Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing. An underlying issue though is how these animals are singing these songs; the original artists are never mentioned in animal form, yet they are part of the fabric of the film universe. Is this some sort of universe in which animals have copies of popular music produced by humans? Were the humans conquered recently a la Planet of the Apes, their music, clothes and cars the only remnants of the pre-animal conquered world? Are there animal versions of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Stevie Wonder and Leonard Cohen (RIP) floating around this animal universe? Really, is there a reason to have animal characters instead of humans? The answer to the last point is a resounding no, besides maybe a cuteness factor that is unrelated to the plot, script or good storytelling techniques.

The closest Sing gets to finding some emotional resonance is at the end, amid the grand performance the animals had worked so hard to perfect despite all the bland and easily avoidable obstacles in their way. After Kelly's elephant rocks out to an uninspired cover of a great Stevie Wonder song, a slight chill ran through my body and I thought maybe this film has found a place in my heart. Then I remembered I had walked through a heavy rain in November to get to this screening and my clothes were still soaked. I continued to shiver, my only comfort being that I won't have to watch Sing again any time soon.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Animated
 

Ask Away

Target audience: Families who can't get tickets to Rogue One.

Take the whole family?: The film gets lazy with a couple of fart jokes, but on the whole there isn't anything objectionable about the content besides the quality.

Theater or Netflix?: Wait for home if you must watch it.

What's the deal with Seth MacFarlene?: He is the one character who bugs me more than anything else in this film. While the other characters are at least trying to do something with their lives, MacFarlene's mouse is awful, never really interested in redeeming himself. That his crappy character also offers MacFarlene to indulge in his fantasies of being Sinatra (when he's at best a C- Bublé)  is all the more frustrating.

Watch this instead?: There's still an animated musical in theaters that is leagues better than this thing. It’s called Moana.