Dir: Matthew Vaughn, 140 mins, starring: Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges
Matthew Vaughn loves his gadgets. Spy sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle is full of them. X-ray spectacles, umbrellas that act as weapon shields, “alpha gel” that miraculously preserves characters you think have been shot dead, London taxis with technology that puts Apollo skyrockets to shame, robotic attack dogs and prosthetic arms are all thrown into the mix. In James Bond movies, Q provides 007 with one or two gizmos. The problem here is that the film is absolutely bulging with them. There is a new toy or piece of hardware or software for every new scene.
Vaughn also has a fetishistic obsession with tailoring: with the suits, ties, watches, boots and shoes the male characters in particular wear. The preoccupation with style gets in the way of the storytelling. He has a formidable cast here including several Oscar winners (Julianne Moore, Colin Firth and Jeff Bridges) but all of them are only allowed to give the most cartoonish of performances.
You can’t fault the stunts. As an action movie, The Golden Circle passes muster. It is packed with explosions, chases and visual spectacle. It is often quite witty too in its own tongue-in-cheek and macabre fashion. The evil villainess Poppy Adams (Moore) likes to put her enemies through the mincing machine and turn them into hamburgers. She has kidnapped Sir Elton John (played by himself) and is keeping him in captivity deep in the jungle, where she has built her own compound in the shape of an old American shopping mall. (It has cinemas, fast-food joints and lots of fluorescent lighting.)
Sir Elton doesn’t get much in the way of meaty dialogue but we do see him at the piano from time to time and when one of the heroes asks for tickets to a concert, he replies in magnificently camp fashion: “Darling, if you save the world, you can have a backstage pass!”
The British filmmakers are keen to show off their patriotic credentials. That much is obvious from the car chase/fight sequence which opens the movie. We’re plunged straight into the action. Eggsy, the youngster from the council estate who was turned Pygmalion-style into a super-suave spy in the first film, is caught up in a vicious fight with his nemesis Charlie Hesketh (Edward Holcroft), in the back of a black cab. Vaughn stages the scene as if it is the chariot race in Ben-Hur but set in Piccadilly and around Hyde Park Corner rather than in a Roman amphitheatre. Vaughn and his collaborators are doing their part for the export drive. It’s hard not to admire the shameless way that even at the most fraught moments, the filmmakers manage to showcase the best of British.
Eggsy (again engagingly played by Taron Egerton) remains remarkably cheerful in the face of setbacks which would floor a lesser spy. He is advised early on that there is “no room for emotion” when you’re working as a Kingsman agent. Whether a pet dog dies, a best friend is killed, he is covered in sewage or his beloved but skittish Scandinavian princess girlfriend (Hanna Alstrom) threatens to leave him, he always keeps calm and carries on.
There are continual and often very disorienting switches in location. After the explosive London-set opening, we’re quickly whisked away to Kentucky where a sister organisation to Kingsman called Statesman is run from a bourbon distillery. Kingsman’s most cerebral operative Merlin (Mark Strong) is very sniffy about the local brew, much preferring single malt from his native Scotland.
Statesman is presided over by the gun-waving Tequila (Channing Tatum in Magic Mike groove), the stetson-wearing patriarch Champagne (Jeff Bridges), the brilliant analyst Ginger Ale (an underused Halle Berry), who would far rather be an agent in the field, and the whip-cracking Whiskey (Pedro Pascal, from Game Of Thrones and Narcos).
From Kentucky, we’re taken back to Britain for an excruciating Ab Fab-like sequence set, for no very good reason, at the Glastonbury Festival. Eggsy has to seduce It Girl Clara (Poppy Delevigne) in order to plant a tracking device deep within her. Other random stop-offs include the Alps (an excuse for a dizzying cable car scene and a few nods in the direction of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and Cambodia, where drug baroness Poppy is hiding out. She comes up with a ludicrous idea for holding the world to ransom by contaminating drug supplies. Anybody who touches the wrong kind of cannabis or cocaine comes out in blue splotches, becomes manic, paralysed and then dies. Poppy is the only one who has the antidote.
To anyone who saw the first film, the presence of Colin Firth’s Harry is disconcerting. It feels like cheating on a Bobby Ewing-like scale to bring him back from the dead. As first encountered here, he has lost much of his memory and has a strange obsession with butterflies – but he’s still as dapper as ever.
Just as in the original movie, the filmmakers are absolutely relentless. When one action set-piece falls flat, they’ll follow it immediately with another to distract us. Some of the visual gags (Keith Allen upside down in a sausage machine) are very funny. Others are laddish and crass in the extreme but there is never a moment to pause or reflect on what is actually going on or why. Lasting for well over two hours, this is a gilded hamster wheel of a movie. Enormous energy is expended but it still feels at the end as if the filmmakers are going around in exactly the same circles as at the beginning.
NINTENDO Switch fans can expect a big new streaming app soon, as Inside is pencilled in for a Nintendo release.
Nintendo Switch fans have been given the news they've been waiting for, as Netflix is FINALLY ready for Nintendo's console.The Nintendo Switch hasn't been short of high quality games since launch, but it is lacking apps.
But according to a new report by Go Nintendo, the Netflix app is “locked and loaded”, which means a release should follow shortly.
It should pave the way for more entertainment apps like Amazon Prime Video and Spotify.
It's also the perfect fit for Switch, letting owners watch videos on the go.
A release date is yet to be revealed, with Nintendo seemingly yet to give the app its approval.
Nintendo Switch Arcade Cabinet: The new essential for classic titles
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Microsoft has managed to get the Halo franchise on Nintendo Switch… but there's a catch.Master Chief will appear as part of the Halo Mash Up Pack in the Nintendo Switch version of Minecraft.
It's all thanks to the Better Together Update, which enables cross-platform play between Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows 10, Android, iOS and more.
This includes DLC like the Halo Mash Up Pack, which is currently available on Xbox One and Xbox 360.
Microsoft addressed cross-platform DLC in a recent Better Together blog post, admitting that while it is open to the idea, some content packs would require permission from different platform holders.
Presumably this means there's still a question mark over the Mario Mash Up Pack appearing on other consoles.
Nintendo showcases the variety of games offered on switch
Nintendo Switch fans have been given even more good games news, as Playdead seemingly confirms plans to bring Inside to Switch.
Inside – which received 5-stars from Express Online – is said to be coming to Nintendo Switch and iOS devices.That's according to game designer Arnt Jensen, who reportedly shared the news with Famitsu.
It's unclear how far into development the game is, and there's currently no word on a release date.
Inside is from the team behind indie hit Limbo, which appeared on platforms including Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4, PS3, iOS, Android, PC and more.
Eggsy, the street kid turned well dressed spy, is back to save the world in Kingsman: The Golden Circle.
A short time after the events of the first movie, Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is living the life of a spy while still mourning the loss of his mentor Harry Hart (Colin Firth). After all the Kingsman are eliminated by an evil drug dealer named Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), Eggsy and Merlin (Mark Strong) are forced to head to Kentucky to get help from America’s version of the Kingsman known as Satesman.
The Statesman group is headed by Champagne aka Champ (Jeff Bridges) and is supported by special agents Tequila (Channing Tatum), Jack Daniels (Pedro Pascal), and tech expert Ginger Ale (Halle Berry). Yes, those names are real. I’m shocked they didn’t have a Shirley Temple on staff.
Eggsy and Merlin learn their old pal Harry is still alive and being held at Statesman’s headquarters. Harry was “killed” in the last movie after the insane church shootout. Ginger Ale provides a super ridiculous science-y explanation for how Harry survived a point blank gunshot to the head. Anyone who is all in on a laser lasso and an underwater car should be ok with absurd life saving technology. Of course, one of the side effects from saving Harry is temporary amnesia – action movies love using amnesia as a trope.
With no Kingsman, Eggsy must team up with his new found allies to stop Poppy before her designer drugs kill millions around the world.
As much fun as 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service was The Golden Circle is not as fun. It does some of the same action with none of the interesting things that made those sequences fun. A big part of what made the first film work was Samuel L Jackson’s incredibly fun performance as Richmond Valentine. Jackson saw the ceiling that said over-the-top and kept going. He was comically evil and that’s perfect for the type of film he was in.
As great of an actress as Julianne Moore is, her character Poppy reduced to a Susie homemaker villain and given very little to do. Poppy is menacing and feared by her team during the opening and the story steers away from at as the story moves forward. You can’t sideline your big bad in an action movie.
The action, much like the action from the first film, includes fun gadgets and tons of slow motion. The best sequence is chase scene/fight at the beginning of the film. It’s the type of strong opening that fans expect in an action movie. There’s more action scenes sprinkled throughout that remind audiences why they love Kingsman so much.
The best villainous action comes courtesy of Charlie (Edward Holcroft) who has a grudge against Kingsman after his run in with Eggsy in the last film. Charlie’s robotic arm is used brilliantly during the fight scenes.
The Golden Circle should’ve taken a hint from John Wick 2 and delved deeper into the spy world of Kingsman. Instead, the story is crippled by a pointless love story between Eggsy and Princess Tilde (Hanna Alstrom). Eggsy’s love story feels completely forced and is the most boring part of the story. The runtime is only 12 minutes longer than the original. The Golden Circle being 40% less fun makes those 12 mins feel like 45 mins.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle had potential to be a fun sequel that told us more about Kingsman and the undercover spy world that supports it. It settled for more of the same in Kingsman, and even more of the same once they arrive at Statesman. It’s not a lazy sequel but a sequel that doesn’t build on anything new.
The PlayStation 4 version of Minecraft will not be getting the upcoming crossplay update that allows players to play together even if they don't have the same console.
The 4K graphics and crossplay update was announced during Microsoft's E3 2017 press conference earlier today and was said to allow players to play together on any device if they played the game on designated “massive” multiplayer servers.
According to rumors, Sony did not allow the game to support crossplay multiplayer functionality. The company has yet to officially comment on the matter.
Whether the 4K graphics update will still be making its way to the PlayStation 4 version of the game is still unknown.
The Minecraft crossplay update will be coming to PC, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS and several virtual reality devices.
When Kingsman: The Secret Service landed in theaters two years ago, it was a surprising, if modestly guilty, pleasure. For more than 30 years—going back at least as far as Never Say Never Again—James Bond had been derided within his own franchise as a “dinosaur,” for his tailored suits, sexist attitudes, and proclivity for violence. Kingsman thus served as a kind of Jurassic Park for the Bondian gentleman spy, resurrecting him from prehistoric Connery DNA discovered in fossilized amber somewhere. It was, as I noted at the time, “reactionary bordering on retrograde bordering on reprobate [but] also a tremendous amount of fun.”
Pulling off such a satirical feat once was hard enough, and it seemed unlikely that the movie’s director, Matthew Vaughn, could manage it a second time. He doesn’t—quite. But Vaughn’s new sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, while not as fresh as its predecessor, is nonetheless better than one might expect: a goofier, more over-the-top treatment of a premise that was pretty goofy and over-the-top the first time around.
Kingsman, you see, is the name of a discreet and oh-so-very-British private intelligence service. (Its headquarters is accessed by way of a luxury tailor on Savile Row.) In the first film we watched the impeccably dressed, umbrella-wielding superspy Harry Hart (Colin Firth) take a young hooligan nicknamed “Eggsy” (Taron Egerton) under his wing and make him into a Kingsman—essentially a killing machine in vest and tie. Alas, before the final reel, Harry himself was shot dead.
Or was he? The trailers for The Golden Circle have not been coy on this point, so I won’t be either. Within the first 15 minutes of the movie, Harry is revealed to have survived, even if he’s dealing with a certain degree of amnesia. (In related news: Finally, Warner Bros! As if anyone ever believed Superman wouldn’t be brought back to life for Justice League.)
But if Harry is still kicking, the same soon cannot be said of most of his fellow Kingsmen. Early in The Golden Circle, their HQ is blown to smithereens, leaving only Eggsy and support staffer “Merlin” (Mark Strong) in one piece. (A post-Hogwarts Michael Gambon gets to play “Arthur,” the head of Kingsman, for mere seconds before meeting his maker.) So Eggsy and Merlin crack open the organization’s only-in-case-of-supreme-emergency safe and discover … a bottle of bourbon? About the time they reach the bottom of it, they recognize it to be a clue and make their way to the Kentucky distillery whence it came. (Aficionados will recall that Kentucky was also the location of the bigot-filled church in the first movie, and thus appears to be the franchise’s stand-in for America as a whole.)
When they arrive at the distillery, Eggsy and Merlin discover a parallel American agency, Statesman, founded at the same time as their own. Replace Kingsman’s bespoke suits with cowboy-wear, their Arthurian codenames with ones based on varying types of liquor, and—well, you get the idea. It’s worth noting here that, although Channing Tatum (“Tequila”) and Jeff Bridges (“Champagne,” or more colloquially, “Champ”) feature prominently as Statesmen in the film’s trailers and other marketing, their roles aren’t much more than cameos. More notable among Kingsman’s “American cousins” are Pedro Pascal (who was marvelous as Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) as “Whiskey” and Halle Barry as support agent “Ginger Ale.”
Once again, a capitalist villain has launched a plan for global genocide transmitted by means of an addictive consumer product; this time, though, it’s drugs rather than smart phones. The villain in question is Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), a vice merchant who has outfitted her jungle lair like a faux 1950s diner—Dr. No by way of Johnny Rockets.
The story proceeds from there pretty much as one might expect. Kingsmen and Statesmen unite to tackle the Poppy problem, double crosses ensue, and numerous action sequences take place that are cleverly choreographed, comically violent, and spatially impossible without abundant CGI assistance. Heroes and villains alike deploy the kinds of gadgets that the Bond franchise grew appropriately embarrassed about long ago—cars with machine guns, cars that turn into subs, robot arms, robot dogs—and there are gags concerning John Denver and the war on drugs. We witness the eating of an exceptionally revolting hamburger and the placement of a diabolically naughty tracking device.
The returning cast is solid, but while Firth and Egerton don’t have quite the twinkle they showed in the previous outing, Strong throws himself fully into Merlin’s delightful brogue. Moore shows off her comic chops as the Happy Daysified supervillain, and Pascal is a charismatic onscreen presence even if his Texan accent occasionally falters.
Which brings me to the extended cameo by a generationally famous pop icon playing himself—I won’t say whom—which begins relatively understated but becomes considerably more gonzo as it progresses. Is it a rather cheap and cheesy bid for audience amusement? Of course it is. But it is nonetheless an effective one.
That is, in fact, a reasonable summary of The Golden Circle overall. Whereas the first Kingsman was a relatively focused spoof of the Bond genre, the sequel goes farther afield for its humor. (There is, after all, no real history of American cowboy-spy movies for Statesman to parody.) The movie is too long, too violent, too silly—too everything. Yet for those who enjoyed the original Kingsman, it is a more than adequate second act. To put it another way: first time satire, second time farce.
Mojang, the development team behind the building game Minecraft, has released a new developer diary video in which they discuss the game's upcoming “Super Duper Graphics Pack” update.
The update was announced during Microsoft's E3 2017 press conference last week and was said to bring 4K graphics to the Xbox One version of the game, along with a range of other graphical enhancements.The PC version of the game already supported 4K resolution rendering.
Both the PC and Xbox One versions of the game will also be able to make use of updated 4K resolution textures as well as other graphical enhancements such as specular maps, emissive maps, updated shadows, updated water rendering and animated foliage.
A cross-play update is also expected to be released this summer for almost all consoles, except for the PlayStation 4, that will enable players to play together regardless of which device the player plays the game on, if they are playing on special designated servers.
The Minecraft “Super Duper Graphics Pack” is expected to launch this fall.
