BEFORE: I gave myself Tuesday off, for several reasons. First off, I picked up a cold and I figured that more than anything, I really needed some sleep on Monday night. So I avoided my usual nightly dose of caffeinated soda and watched the last 45 minutes of "Jurassic Park III" on cable, and I was out around 1:30 am, which is three hours earlier than usual. If I hadn't fallen asleep then, I would have resorted to watching a Netflix comedy special, those keep managing to put me to sleep, even if they're very good ones.
But part of the reason I was so tired was that I had to get up early on Monday morning for an appointment with an ear doctor, which confirmed that I have had significant hearing loss in my right ear. I've been aware for a long while that I've been favoring my left ear when talking on the phone, and then when I had the flu in March and my head was all clogged up, I could barely hear out of either ear, except for a throbbing that was producing auditory hallucinations of a sort. I could hear noises that sounded like they were coming from outside or next door, only they weren't real. Now my choices to correct the hearing loss would seem to be to either have surgery or get a hearing aid. While surgery may correct the problem, it seems riskier, and getting a hearing aid would seem to allow me more options - if I'm in a restaurant or on the subway near loud, obnoxious people, I can always turn it off, right? Anyway, I've got a few weeks to think about it.
In the meantime, I'm faced with a dilemma over this film, which according to one source (Wikipedia) has Samuel L. Jackson in it, though only in a flashback sequence, but on the IMDB, he's not listed at all. So, should I watch it here, or not? Which source do I trust? What happens if I get an hour into the film and he still hasn't shown up, should I continue? That would break the chain, if he's not there, or if they just show his picture on a wall or something, does that count? I think I've got to risk it, because I really want to watch this sequel, and if I don't, I'll be one film short for the year. So here's hoping that SLJ carries over again from "The Hitman's Bodyguard"...
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Kingsman: The Secret Service" (Movie #2,289)
THE PLOT: When their headquarters are destroyed and the world is held hostage, the Kingsman's journey leads them to the discovery of an allied spy organization in the United States. These two elite secret organizations must band together to defeat a common enemy.
AFTER: Thankfully, Samuel L. Jackson turned up 45 minutes into the film, and telling you this doesn't give anything away, because they just used footage from the first film as a flashback to explain how another character can still be alive, when he died in the first film. This fact itself is one of the worst-kept movie secrets ever, because that guy's on the poster and was in all of the trailers for the sequel. Remember, this film is based on a comic book, and comic book heroes never die forever - those deaths only last as long as it takes the writer to come up with a very unlikely reason to explain how they could have survived. Superman died and came back, so did Batman, Captain America has died at least twice, same goes for Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man, you name it. They killed off Wolverine about 2 years ago in the comics, and he's coming back in a couple of weeks - well, the comic is called "The Return of Wolverine" so it's a safe bet, anyway. Hawkeye died once and I think Scarlet Witch just magicked him alive again, and somehow everyone was OK with that lame explanation. Hulk died twice in the last two years, and his new comic is called "The Immortal Hulk" to reflect the fact that death is meaningless to these heroes.
Anyway, that major character from the first film is alive again here, surprising nobody - I'll wager this has everything to do with how popular the first "Kingsman" film turned out to be, which surprised many people I think. Who knew that essentially a parody of the James Bond/Mission Impossible genre that was even more over-the-top than the films it was making fun of, could itself be so much fun? The audience gives the Bond and M:I films a lot of leeway - we see characters using laser watches and false faces that represent impossible tech and think "Yeah, all right, that could happen" when it really never could. "Kingsman: The Secret Service" started there and pushed the barriers of believability even further, so now we've got cyborg arms and robot dogs and underwater cars, suggesting that we'll someday have these things in the real world, only nobody's working on inventing these things, we're too busy fighting over Supreme Court nominees. In a comic book you can give a character a cyborg arm that turns into a cannon and nobody would think twice about it, but if someone tried to invent that in the real world, they'd be considered insane. An amputee would generally be happy with an arm that just works like an arm.
The villain here is just as unlikely as all the impossible tech - an American woman who runs a drug cartel, one who somehow got a monopoly on the world's supply, forcing out all of the South Americans. She's so evil that she turned Machu Picchu into her personal compound, and designed it as a tribute to an idealized United States of the 1950's, with a diner and a bowling alley and a donut shop. This is another hint that nothing here is meant to be taken all that seriously, because who the frick would do that? For that matter, what drug dealer would intentionally try to poison their customers? Though they do point out here that this would be ridiculously short-sighted, just mentioning that does not negate the fact that as a plan, it doesn't make much sense.
There's ALMOST an argument made here for legalization of drugs, which in theory would solve a number of problems in society (the number of people incarcerated, for one) but I have to imagine would also cause quite a few more at the same time. Yes, if drugs were legal there would technically be fewer criminals, but what about other crimes that are tangential to the drug trade, such as driving while under the influence? With the legalization of marijuana in some states, we might be getting closer to a world where pot is legal, but I think you still have to draw the line somewhere, because legalizing cocaine and heroin could hurt more people (health wise) than it would help, and the industries that supply the harder drugs are more criminal and terrorist-based, right? I mean, farmers grow marijuana, but drug lords grow coke and heroin. Plus the harder drugs need to be refined, so there's an entire illegal industry built up around them.
But it's another look at the semantics of good and evil tonight - are ALL drug users evil, or is that just a label that parts of society have chosen to place on them? If all of the drugs were tainted, does everyone, even casual users, deserve to go down with the ship? It's one thing to be on the moral high ground and say that all drug users are criminals, but where do you draw that line? What about sick people who need painkillers? People who are not addicted, but use drugs and still contribute to society? What about rock musicians, are they just supposed to come up with new music without taking drugs? As soon as you start to paint everyone with the same brush, things become very murky.
But this leads to a depiction of the U.S. President that can only be now seen as very Trumpian (Trumpish? Trump-esque?) because his solution to a certain percentage of citizens getting sick is to round them up and put them in detention camps. Sorry, he recommends that they come forward for voluntary separation from the general populace, so their symptoms can be addressed. Which is really just putting them in camps - tomato, to-MAH-to. Hmm, now where have we seen this type of approach before? You have to wonder if, way back when the AIDS crisis first hit, there were Reagan-era politicians who thought that rounding up infected people and at-risk gay men and isolating them might have made sense - but you just can't solve problems like that, it smacks of Hitler's approach to Jews, gays, and other segments of the population he didn't like. And yet we still have immigrant children in camps right now, and the political firestorm over it seems to have died down. WTF?
The only way that this differs from real-world events is that Fox News is seen here investigating the President's misdeeds and calling for his impeachment, when, come on, we all know they're going to support anything that a conservative President does, even rounding up his own citizens and letting them die, while not paying the ransom or even searching for a cure. The Fox News headline here would be "the President wins the war on drugs!" while not mentioning a few million deaths.
It's a little odd, I thought, that the villain strikes against the heroes first, decimating the ranks of the Kingsmen. This forces the remaining agents to seek out their sister organization in the U.S., known as the Statesmen. It's even odder that the Statesmen, a similar independent intelligence-gathering organization, didn't even have the Golden Circle on their radar. Was the whole world just asleep at the switch here? And if neither the Kingsmen OR the Statesmen had the skinny on the Golden Circle, why didn't that criminal organization just continue to do business in secret, why go on the attack? You don't see bank robbers blowing up the local police station just to make it easier to rob banks, when it makes much more sense to just try to rob banks without the police finding out.
As a by-product of the effects of the disease (which includes a long period of paralysis), there are some top actors woefully underused here, most notably Channing Tatum. He spends most of his scenes in this film lying in a hospital bed - now, maybe he was very busy and only available for a few shooting days, but it still seems like a shame, a real head-scratcher if you ask me. Same goes for Emily Watson, who spends a good part of the movie basically standing completely still - that's just mind-boggling, you hire a name actor and then ask them to do nothing. But hey, Eddie Redmayne got an Oscar for essentially just sitting in a chair, so there's a precedent for that. (I'm a Hawking fan, but I still think giving that performance an Oscar was a bunch of B.S.)
I have to issue a NITPICK POINT for the meat-grinder the villain uses in the 1950's diner scene. I realize that this film is more or less a live-action cartoon, but this was beyond ridiculous. They were striving for a scene that echoed the wood-chipper in "Fargo", perhaps combined with the human meat-grinders seen in "Pink Floyd: The Wall". But you can't put a person in a meat-grinder head-first and get something that looks like hamburger to come out the other side. At the risk of getting very gross here (though the movie had no problem doing so) what happened to the guy's bones, like his skull? You don't put a full cow in a meat grinder, you trim off pieces of beef and then cube them, so the grinder can handle it. Now, sure, maybe this was a super high-tech, industrial-strength, James Bond-level grinder, but still, how did it separate out the guy's bone fragments, brains, eyeballs, etc. Plus, what happened to his clothes? Are there bits of fabric in the ground meat?
This only works from a story standpoint if the grinder was a fake, like if it ground up the body and put those bits down a chute, then dispensed ground beef, not human meat, from a separate compartment. Then the other bad-guy being forced to eat the grilled hamburger would just be a test of his loyalty, not an exercise in cannibalism. Because maybe eating human meat wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but eating little bits of eyeballs and brain, and all the unprocessed blood, it's just sickening, and not recommended at all. But, no, there's no dodge here, the audience is being asked to believe that a fully clothed man goes in HERE, and somehow edible meat comes out THERE, with no hair, bones, clothing - it's just not possible, except in cartoons.
Another NITPICK POINT: Who the hell would put a retirement home so close to a mountain in the Alps? I get that this served a narrative purpose, creating a thing that needed to be saved from danger, but come on! Can old people even function at that high altitude? Wouldn't they always be out of breath, due to the lack of oxygen? Plus there's the obvious threat of an avalanche, if that should happen those senior citizens would never be able to shuffle out of the way in time. This could have been a skiing school for kids, or an St. Bernard animal shelter, anything else would have made more sense than a retirement community.
Final NITPICK POINT: even though I'm not a whiskey drinker, I know that there's "whisky" with no "E" in it, which comes from Scotland, and "whiskey" with an "E" in it, that comes from other places. But when you're talking about Kentucky, where the Statesmen are based, they would most likely use the term "bourbon" instead - bourbon is a form of whiskey, of course, but a specific kind made from corn. If you're talking about Tennessee, Jack Daniels is made from corn, rye and barley, but if you move over to Kentucky and consider Maker's Mark, that's a bourbon whiskey made from mostly corn. Again, not a big spirits guy but I think this distinction would be important to some people.
Also starring Colin Firth (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Julianne Moore (last seen in "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"), Taron Egerton (last heard in "Sing"), Mark Strong (last seen in "The Way Back"), Halle Berry (last seen in "The Flintstones"), Channing Tatum (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Jeff Bridges (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Pedro Pascal (last seen in "The Adjustment Bureau"), Edward Holcroft (last seen in "Kingsman: The Secret Service"), Hanna Alström (ditto), Tobias Bakare (ditto), Samantha Womack (ditto), Bruce Greenwood (last seen in "Gold"), Emily Watson (last seen in "Miss Potter"), Elton John (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Sophie Cookson (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Michael Gambon (last heard in "Hail, Caesar!"), Sofia Boutella (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Thomas Turgoose, Calvin Demba, Poppy Delevingne (last seen in "Pirate Radio"), Keith Allen (last seen in "Eddie the Eagle"), Tom Benedict Knight (last seen in "Dracula Untold"), Mark Arnold (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Björn Granath (last seen in "The American"), Lena Endre (last seen in "The Master"), with cameos from Shannon Bream, Bill Hemmer.
RATING: 7 out of 10 pugs (not drugs)
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