deepdarkwaters

Pacing is just awful, especially in the first half. It's pretty slow and boring around moments of good stuff, but it does pick up eventually.

ORLANDO OXFORD

If anything's going to rocket me out of years of writer's block it's the big Polly/Oxford femdom vibes. Link me immediately if you see any! Massive weary eye roll at having one Token Lady Character yet again, but at least she got more to do than most of the others and more respect from the writers than Roxy. Hope she takes off as a fandom fave because I really really want to see more of her. Same with Shola - you're gonna cast an actor with as much charisma and expertise as Djimon Hounsou and think that means you can get away with giving him this flimsy underwritten character with so much potential and absolutely no substance just because you know he’ll fill it out with his presence? COME ON. Fandom, do your thing.

"Oxfords not rogues" is a bit cringey.

Beautiful fight scenes, like always, and I appreciate that there's a lot of really brutal ugly stuff as well as the silly flashy music video type thing we're used to, but they seriously fucked themselves with the church scene in TSS because that was so impeccably shot and performed and was 95% of the reason I went back to gape at that film about another eight times but nothing since than has really been on the same level. Giving my favourite a sword is always going to work some kind of swoony magic for me (fun fact: my first Kingsman fic was a 67K word excuse to write Harry having a sword fight) but overall, the fights in this are all just a little bit disappointing because they're SO CLOSE to the greatness they've proved they can give us but never quite tip over from just good. I mean they're still very good!!! But not "please enjoy Mr Darcy murdering fifty bigots" good.

Some lovely technical stuff: notably a sort of time lapse of war devastating the countryside and a Wings type shot that made me a bit motion sick. CHEF'S KISS. Same actor playing Wilhelm, Nicholas and George was a nice touch too.

MORTON? Tell me the story of this family link.

Lots of lovely ridiculous moustaches plus one of my favourite tropes, "handsome elegant gentleman experiences trauma so he gets drunk about it and grows a messy beard which shows everybody he's at rock bottom except for B who is a pervert and likes her favourites to suffer and have facial hair".

Stanley Tucci should be in every film.

Harris Dickinson is so generically handsome that I immediately forget he exists two seconds after he leaves the screen. He's a competent enough actor, he just has all the presence of a gentle fart in a gale and vanishes completely beside everyone else in this. Pretty weird casting choice, especially after finding Taron for TSS who could absolutely stand up to all the greats he was chucked in with.

Someone's definitely been snooping at fandom and either badly BADLY misunderstood the appeal of "gay honeypot mission" or (let's be honest, more likely) decided to make a mean-spirited joke of it. Thank you for getting the love of my life moaning in his cute little underpants! No thank you for basically everything else about that scene, and especially no thank you for showing the world how I eat Bakewell tarts.

There's not nearly as much irreverence in this as TSS/TGC. TSS especially is a bit more lighthearted and goofy and parody-ish while still getting enough of a real emotional impact to spark this glorious devoted fandom. This one tipped a bit too far into the Generic WW1 Drama genre, complete with that same old boring cliche shot of the guy running heroically through a storm of gunfire without being hit once. I mean, I get it??? Narratively it works as it's supposed to. It's just tedious and dreary and lazy and not what people see these films for.

I've managed to avoid all spoilers so Conrad being killed was a genuine surprise! Probably should have seen that coming, given what TGC said about the founders, but didn't somehow. Again, like with everyone else, I want MORE ARCHIE. Him being shunted from the trenches into aristo world is really intriguing to me, but maybe that's just because it kind of mirrors Eggsy's journey and I miss him.

Knife shoes origin story made me very happy <3 Some of the callback details were a bit shit and forced but that one was a beauty. Also I have a massive fear of heights so yet again they fuck me up extremely effectively with High Up Peril.

Terrible lazy cartoony boring ridiculous villain. Rasputin was crass and unpleasant but at least he fulfilled my flashy fight scene needs. Shepherd/Morton was just a bit rubbish. Spy films are only as good as their villains, right? This one was another waste of a good engaging charismatic actor. He could and should have been better, then the whole showdown sequence might have felt like it had some real weight and danger and excitement to it. I don't deserve this cruel letdown and neither does my husband Ralph.

I'm running out of steam and can't remember much else that really stood out. The tl;dr reaction is that it's a bit meh, the tone and pacing are badly off, and most of the characters are underdeveloped in a way that should be illegal for people lucky enough to do this as their job, but nevertheless it's so nice to be back in this world again even if nothing on the screen really holds up to the quality of stuff produced by fanfic authors ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ A few interesting characters and relationship dynamics and new details to play with, but nothing that can't be as universally ignored as TGC canon. Nice fight scenes, sometimes with SWORDS. My favourite cries. No dogs die.

5/10 as a film 8/10 for fight scenes 10/10 for fanwork potential 12/10 for Ralph Fiennes' perfect beautiful face

(And I mean it, hook me up with that Polly/Oxford femdom content!)