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.
The Kingsman are teaming up with the Statesmen and just like in America, they made everything bigger. Not necessarily better.
It’s hard to live up to expectations when the first time around, there were none. Kingsman: The Secret Service was the sleeper hit of 2015, as no one really knew what to expect from the movie going in. While doing press for that film, writer and director Matthew Vaughn kept saying that he had great ideas for a sequel and to build upon the characters we knew in the first one, and just needed the public to like the first one enough to get it made. Flash forward to 2017, with Kingsman: The Golden Circle now in theaters and fans asking themselves, “So where’s that movie?”
It’s been a year since Valentine was defeated by Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and Merlin (Mark Strong), and Eggsy has settled nicely into his role as Galahad. When a familiar face reappears, the entirety of Kingsman is wiped out, forcing Galahad and Merlin to go into “Doomsday protocol” and team up with the Statesmen, their American cousins. There, Agents Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), Tequila (Channing Tatum), Ginger Ale (Hallie Berry) and Champagne (Jeff Bridges) offer their assistance and resources to the remaining Kingsman agents (and a “surprise” appearance by the original Galahad, Harry Hart (Colin Firth)) to stop the Golden Circle, headed by Poppy (Julianne Moore).
Egerton is once again a driving force in the film, giving audiences the same charm, emotion, and humor that won them over in the first film. Eggsy’s journey to become a Kingsman hasn’t ended yet, as he struggles to hide his emotional response and step into the shoes of a true gentleman spy. But by the end, it’s clear that even his mentor sees his emotion as a strength, not a weakness. Though cliche, it’s a nice touch considering how much Eggsy has changed from the punk he once was, and how Egerton has built such a complex character.
One unexpected positive was the increase of Mark Strong’s role. Merlin was simply a helping hand in the first film, but he feels more like a co-worker in this one. Strong’s chemistry with the other Kingsman agents was great before and becomes stronger as his chemistry is mostly with Eggsy now. With Harry gone for the first half of the film, Merlin fulfills the role of his mentor, and Strong slips into it like he was playing Harry. It was a touching arc for a character that became bigger as the film went on.
Harry Hart’s return was not a surprise to anyone, as they revealed his return with a custom poster back in April 2016. The excuse for the return is just as unoriginal as the idea of bringing back an actor killed off (Think something as ridiculous as the super blood from Star Trek: Into Darkness). Outside of his reappearance, Firth’s return to the role is better than the last time. Eggsy failed to get closure with Harry before his untimely death, and the film recognizes this. There’s a touching conversation between Harry and Eggsy that shows Harry has a little more compassion this time around. If their relationship felt like a father-son relationship before, it even more like that this time around.
It’s hard to rate anyone else’s performance in this film because these actors had little to work with in terms of a script. Though the original Kingsman agents got their own arcs and grew, the Statesmen agents were given the leftovers. The only character trait we really get for Tatum’s Agent Tequila is he’s the agency’s “resident bad boy” as stated by Ginger Ale in the film. Agent Whiskey just feels like a modernized version of Pascal’s character in Game of Thrones and Jeff Bridges as Champagne is just straight up wasted. Even supporting characters like Arthur, Roxy and Charlie from the first film got more characterization than any of the Statesmen. There are so many new additions to the cast that it becomes impossible to flesh out all of these characters properly.
Even though many of the film’s key points were revealed through the various promotional materials, a decision that Vaughn himself criticized, there was still plenty of action and twists to keep audiences entertained. The film chooses to take the favorite pieces of the first film and make them greater, which many critics have been panning. The violence, crude humor, and alcoholism have all been kicked up to a new level, and whether you like it or not, it fits inside the film’s branding. It makes the film fun, whether it gets praised or panned by critics. The film does feel extremely bloated though, with many plot line that seems like they’re starting, but get quickly smashed and forgotten about. According to Vaughn, the film’s first cut was over 3 hours long, so that explains a lot.
The term “sequel fatigue” has been thrown around while talking about the summer box office a lot these past few weeks. Kingsman: The Golden Circle doesn’t avoid this, but it’s the least affected by this curse. It manages to pull a few new punches and offer up a good amount of fun at the theater. The film isn’t original or breaking barriers, but it doesn’t have to. In a summer full of superheroes, animals, bachelorette parties and stunt drivers, it’s good to see the gentlemen spies taking it home.
Mojang has announced that the beta version of the cross-platform multiplayer update for Minecraft titled “Better Together” is now available on PC and Android.
The update was announced in June during Microsoft's E3 2017 press conference and is said to allow players to play together on any of the supported platforms via special multiplayer servers.
According to a recent press release, the “Better Together” update is designed to unify the console, mobile and Windows 10 PC versions of the game under one single Minecraft edition, which will include infinite worlds, the community Marketplace and community servers.
The update also introduces the “biggest collection of new features ever” to players on PC and mobile devices. Players will notice the long awaited and much in demand stained glass, fireworks, customizable banners, armor stands, jukebox and music discs, recipe book and ravines.
For multiplayer, the update adds the ability for hosts to set player permissions and host options, along with other helpful tools, including new 3D model import features.
The beta test is now available on PC and Android and will be available on Xbox One at a later date. The PlayStation 4 version of the game will not be getting cross-platform multiplayer capabilities.
Xbox One and PC beta testers are required to download the Xbox Insider app, and players on Xbox One will need to own a digital copy of Minecraft: Xbox One Edition. Beta testers on Android will need to have a device that support Google Play and own a copy of the game purchased through the Google Play Store.
