TL;DR: Deceivingly good trailer, shit movie.
It pains me to write a review like this when I'm a fan of Cavill, Cena and Jackson.
The writer and director just couldn't make up their mind what kind of movie it is supposed to be. They could've gone for: 1) light-hearted spy movie with a few clichéd plot points 2) romance 3) 'normal' type of comedy 4) 'absurd' type of comedy. They went for all 4.
The plot didn't make sense, and they were more concerned with making fun and cool moments rather than a cohesive film. Here's some examples:
Why was Argyle being all seductive to Ellie in her 'hallucinations', if it was just her own subconscious trying to bring back her memory? Why was Aiden shown as Argyle if it was really Ellie herself? When the oil skating scene was over all I could think of was why weren't her knees covered in oil?
The CGI was terrible. Dua Lipa clearly never touched the accelerator on her bike. Even the server room looked bad.
Another Bond pastiche from Matthew Vaughn, and once again it’s worse than the last one. Here we have what is basically another Kingsman film, but this time it’s made for the wine moms who had found their new favorite film with The Lost City. The plot is quite bonkers, it's so dense and the amount of schlocky plot twists indicate that Vaughn’s at least somewhat aware of how tasteless it all is. Sometimes you can still find traces of the cleverness you’d expect from him, but generally it favours being loud and cringe. I understand that he’s targeting a different demographic here than with Kingsman, but the end result is so tame and commercial that it feels more like typical streaming filler (Red Notice, Ghosted). Some of the acting is atrocious. Obviously Rockwell puts in the best work, but it doesn’t make up for the stiff performances by Cavill, Howard and Lipa (though she gets a pass for being Dua Lipa). The directing is also noticeably a step down compared to Vaughn’s previous stuff. It doesn’t feel like he put much heart and soul in this, because besides some good stuntwork it looks like shit. There’s just so much plastic sheen (artificial bright lighting, tacky CGI, unnatural compositions and camera movement) that it becomes incredibly ugly to look at. You could pass that off as ‘well it’s meant to be cartoonish’, but I’m not going to make that leap when there’s this little artistry to it. Vaughn needs to stop making these, the whole thing feels predictable and played out.
2.5/10
