"Kingsman: The Golden Circle" recently received a round of critical panning from British viewers. While the reviews were not enough to ruin the movie, the director may want to heed the critics' words.
Robbie Collin from The Telegraph UK expressed that despite the big Hollywood powerhouse casting of the "Kingsman" sequel, the word "slog" would not do justice to it. Collin then gave the movie a low rating — one star out of five.
Collin argued that the lack of actual threats to the characters of the movie made its action scenes uninteresting. In the previous installment, Harry Hart (Colin Firth) got shot in the head, but the sequel showed him fully recovered due to a "magical healing gel" that was applied to his wounds. This made the action scenes inconsequential, as the main characters could easily be healed and brought back to life. Apart from this, the movie was allegedly lacking director Matthew Vaughn's trademark — threatening and gripping action sequences.
The Guardian UK gave the film three stars out of five. Critic Gwilym Mumford criticized the movie for its cartoonish feel, which made it look like it took itself less seriously than the first film. Mumford also went on about the lengthy two-hour run time of the movie, which could have been decreased by shortening some of the unnecessary action scenes or removing them entirely.
While some may consider "Kingsman: The Golden Circle" as more of the same good thing, many critics, apparently, perceived it as a lot less than its predecessor. A recurring criticism of the film is that it brought nothing new to the franchise.
Despite the relatively harsh critical reception, "Kingsman: The Golden Circle" still holds up its own, as the movie has a decent aggregate critic score of 74 percent on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing.
"Kingsman: The Golden Circle" premiered in the United Kingdom on Sept. 20.
