KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE. Matthew Vaughn, dir., co script. Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn, script, from the comic book The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Darren Gilford, production design. UK/USA: Twentieth Century Fox (presents), Marv Film, Shangri-La Entertainment, TSG Entertainment (production) / 20th Century Fox and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (major distribution), 2017. Second in what may become a series; see IMDb for details on this film.[1]

A "farce of the old English humour," to misapply a phrase from T. S. Eliot,[2] having comic-book fun with the mashup genre of action-adventure, almost-super-human espionage agency (and agents and villains), plus fairy-tale romance ("The Frog Prince"). Relevant here are some of the more central gadgets. The villain's main enforcer has two prosthetic arms — one succeeding the other — that combine the hand of Rotwang[3] with the arm of the Terminator made independent of a human wearer, if necessary, and far more deadly;[4] cf. and contrast also various arms for cyborg Barry in the Archer animation series.[5] The villain has a female-gendered robot who is designed to look girly but is of the strong, silent, deadly sort; more screen-time and a couple subjective shots go to two very large robot mastiffs and to the grinders in their mouths. The villain also has a large meat grinder suitable for reducing good-sized men to hamburger (note Eliot on "savage comic humour"). Note also images of potentially threatening or just nasty containment of people, with surveillance of a padded cell in one case, and of containment in cryogenic suspension to save the life of one of the good guys in another case. Unusual if not so far unique in major movies, a tracking device is introduced into a woman's body through mucas membranes in her vagina (the action is acted and shot with good taste, but take seriously the MPAA "R" rating of the film).

Caution: The film's drug-war politics are too convoluted, contradictory, perverse and clever to be as useful as they might be.

RDE, Initial compiler, 26Sep17, 27Sep17