My Own Little World

Sicario has grown on me since I first saw it a couple years ago. It is even more timely now than it was then, casting moral ambiguity onto the War on Drugs and its fallout around the U.S.-Mexico border. With its beautiful yet bleak composition from director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer/legend Roger Deakins and excellent performances from Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, that film asks a lot of questions about grey areas and, due to its construction, lets each individual audience member answer them. That’s the biggest difference between that film and its sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado : while in some respects it does keep pace with its predecessor, its treatment of its events’ moral standing leaves a lot to be desired. We view the actions of Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) and Matt Graver (Brolin) through the lens of Blunt’s Kate Macer, an outsider who is seeing all these grisly, gruesome acts for the first time. She bears the emotional weight of the fi...

I loved the first Kingsman  movie. It was such a breath of fresh air with its ridiculousness and on-the-nose parody of its genre (not too far off from what I felt Deadpool  did with its genre). Matthew Vaughn's direction made it quite a briskly-paced film as well while also having enough substance and good character writing to make it good in the slower, smaller moments. Naturally, I was looking forward to seeing this sequel after such a refreshing initial installment. Unfortunately, Kingsman: The Golden Circle  suffers dearly from a rampant disease in Hollywood: sequelitis. It's that condition that so many second and third installments have where they try to make everything bigger in scope by stuffing every second of the film with subplots upon subplots and new characters upon new characters. This typically results in very poorly paced movies where the audience is seldom given a moment to breathe. And...that's exactly what happened here. Now, I will say that if you...