'KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE'........FOR YOUR CGI ONLY........

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)    By every critical criteria that we've established here at the BQ, we well know that we should loathe and despise this movie........with every molecule of our being.

             First......it's too goddamned long for a brainless, idiotic popcorn movie. We don't know at what point in time that directors of pop culture trifles convinced themselves they were all David Lean making "Lawrence Of Arabia"........but make it down as a dark day.

             Second.......engorged with CGI......the toxic scourge so beloved by movie directors with lazy imaginations and loads of studio cash to employ multiple special effects companies and their armies of digital animators.........(we envision they keep these folks chained to their terminals, working to the beat of pounding mallets, like the galley slaves in "Ben Hur")

            Third.......... speaking of toxic scourges........mincemeat, food-processor editing.......which has fundamentally destroyed all modern action-adventure films, rendering fight and chase scenes into unwatchable chop suey of random images.   It has yet to dawn on dumbbell movie directors that audiences can't care about that's going on in these sequences.......if they can't see what the hell's going on in these sequences.........

              Fourth.........moronic gimmicks. "Kingsman" has stuff that rivals "Die Another Day"s invisible car for scoring high on the Stupidity Scale. One guy comes equipped with a laser lasso that looks like something discarded from 'Wonder Woman'.  There's also, if we remember this right, some kind of gooey salve that restores people who inconveniently got their brains blown out......

             And having itemized all that........we admit with the deepest guilt and shame......we enjoyed the movie.

             Why?  Simple. It's secret agents, baby!

             We were raised on secret agent movies.....not just the Bonds, but all the imbecilic, Euro-trashy imitations that flooded the world thereafter.  These movies were our drug of choice and we couldn't get enough of 'em.......the crazier and sillier, the more we loved 'em.

            So we could never, never drop a bucket 'o hate on "Kingsman: The Golden Circle".....cause this is a movie that can trace its ancestry to films like "Secret Agent Fireball", "Lightning Bolt", "Secret Agent Superdragon" and many others.........all near and dear to our heart.  These movies functioned as our personal opioids......without the lingering after-effects....(unless you count this blog as one of them)

           And come to think of it, there's one or two things in this film we actually liked......Julianne Moore's dementedly cheerful Super-Villainess and her equally fruitcake secret jungle lair......a 1950's 'American Graffiti"-"Happy Days" shopping center, complete with a malt shop equipped to grind up Julianne's enemies into hamburgers.

               What more can we say?  Chaotic and deeply flawed as it is, the movie still hit our sweet spot.  We may show little or no patience with superhero comic book movies......but give us some British guys in spiffy dark suits wielding bulletproof umbrellas......you had us at hello.  3 stars (***)