Film
The suave spies, in their bespoke suits are back. When their headquarters are destroyed, and once more the world held hostage, the Kingsman seek the help of an allied spy organisation in the US, the Statesman. These two elite secret organisations must band together to defeat a common enemy.
Onward Eggsy (Taron Egerton – Sing, Kingsman: The Secret Service) and Merlin (Mark Strong – The Brothers Grimsby, The Imitation Game), fearless in their pursuit of justice. The Kingsman and the Statesmen, lead by Champ (Jeff Daniels – Hell or High Water, R.I.P.D), must now band together to defeat a common enemy, and formidable enemy. With the Statesman codenames following various liquor names, in line with their location of their secret base, one can detect a hint of rivalry.
The second film in this Kingsman series is an action packed ride of fun, with some over the top locations, fights, and story. Rewatch value is pretty high on this one, so it is sure to make a great addition to any home movie collection, especially if one owns the first Kingsman movie.
Read the full SAMDB review of Kingsman: The Golden Circle.
Disc
Overall Kingsman: The Golden Circle, on DVD, is a good disc technically. Bonus features are sparse, but this does leave room for a higher bitrate for the film, which is an enjoyable one.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle is available now, to purchase on disc, in South
Africa.
Video
Video is encoded at a high average bitrate. There are no visible artefacts on-screen, nor any visible colour bleed. Detail is maintained in the several darker scenes.
Bitrate on the menu system is lower, leaving more room on the disc for the main feature, but is still good, with compression artefacts visible. The same goes for the bonus feature video.
Viewers with the necessary hardware or software can scale up to a larger, or higher resolution screen, should they wish.
Audio
Audio is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, with dialogue clear via the centre speaker. The weight of the soundtrack is carried by the front channels in slower scenes, with the surround channels used to great effect in the many action sequences, expanding the on-screen action, and further drawing the viewer into the story.
Navigation
Navigation is simple, and easy to follow. The disc takes the viewer directly to the main menu, through a transition. The main menu has a motion background of a few clips from the main feature, with accompanying music.
There are text buttons to play the main feature, set up, scenes, and extras.
The set up sub-menu allows one to select the desired audio language, and select a sub-menu for subtitle selection.
The scenes sub-menus each contains four large, colour, still thumbnails, for a total of twenty eight chapters. While these are numbered, they are not labelled, nor is there a chapter listing in the DVD packaging, meaning that some guesswork would be involved in trying to navigate to a particular part of the film.
The extras sub-menu has text links for the two included bonus features.
Bonus Features
Black Cab Chaos: Anatomy of a Killer Chase – A featurette showing how the taxi cab chase, fight and shootout was created, using a mixture of computer generated footage, filmed footage, and green screen work.
A very interesting video, just over ten minutes long, that is sure to fascinate fans, and be of interest to the budding filmmaker.
Kingsman Archives – A collection of concept art, and stills of the cast, sets, and props, presented in the form of a slideshow. One can navigate manually, or allows for automatic advancement. Navigation of these is explained on-screen.
Packaging
Packaging for the DVD is standard, with a plastic jewel case. The front has a poster, with the film title.
The back of the case has a short synopsis, a single still image from the film, bonus feature listing, and the usual technical labels.
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