Kingsman 2 and Miss Peregrine's

Plane film 1 - Kingsman: The Golden Circle

I quite liked the first Kingsman movie, and it had one extremely memorable extended action shot, but I didn’t particularly like Eggsy as a character and wasn’t nearly hooked enough to see it in the cinema. As another plane film, though, I thought it was worth my time.

This film was a lot more cartoonish than the first, and struggled with tone. I can’t be shocked by the evilness of a villainess forcing her underlings into cannibalism when she has robot dogs watching. I can’t ponder the hypocrisies of the legality of different drugs and the power of drug lords when Elton John is doing flying kicks. The film never seemed sure whether it wanted to be a spy thriller or a comedy, and while it could have pulled off a mix of both, it was often too jarring.

This film sees millions endangered by a classic bad buy plot that basically boils down to poisoning everyone and extorting them for the antidote. Eggsy and co are in dire straits and need help from overseas counterparts. Everything works out through a combination of character shields, coincidence, techno-magic and bad guys attacking one by one, but there are some great setpieces on the way, some fantastic combat choreography (especially with a lasso), and some satisfying moments of going out in a blaze of glory and self-sacrifice.

Julianne Moore and Halle Berry have fun with their roles here, and unsurprisingly Colin Firth had to be brought back even if it’s all a bit dubious. I’d probably have enjoyed this a lot more if it had picked either comedy or drama wholeheartedly, but it was still a fun little diversion.

Plane film 2 – Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

This seemed like my sort of film – Tim Burton directing a gothic-tinged story about kids with superpowers set (at least in part) in the 40s. But I wasn’t desperate to see it, mostly because it just seemed like yet another retread of the X-Men premise of a bunch of kids with superpowers gathered together in a school until a menacing force makes the unleash their powers and kick bad guy butt.

I’m glad I’ve seen it now, and it was also a pretty fun movie not to be taken seriously, but in many ways it was also a disappointment. The smaller disappointment was how long the thing took to get going, with the central conflict not even rising until about an hour in. The much larger one ended up being that there was absolutely no question whatsoever of the bad guys overpowering the good. On the good guy side there were a couple of useless kids, sure, but then a slew of them who could kill you with a glance. The bad guys were basically Mystique, Iceman and Beast, and just never had any chance against the far more powerful kids. Samuel L. Jackson in particular is constantly talked up as powerful and unstoppable, but can’t actually do anything much and gets easily stopped by some of the less powerful children. He, his fellow baddies and the supposedly feral monsters are also bizarrely careful not to harm any kiddies or cause any serious injury to random passers-by in Blackpool.

It was fun to see the kid from Hugo again, older and lankier than before. Shame neither he nor Miss Peregrine herself had much character. Samuel L. Jackson and Judi Dench obviously have fun, and this is undeniably a feast for the eyes almost throughout. It’s a fun film to look at, and the kids’ designs are great. The problem is the story is so generic, the setting has been seen many times before, the climax is a real let-down and the rules of time travel and affecting the future are completely arbitrary.

How I wish I knew what that magic x-factor is that makes a kids’ book successful in America, even if it’s just a rehash…