The King’s Man is an abhorrently unlikable misfire, and I truly hope I do not have to see its like again anytime soon.

Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a tone-deaf, oftentimes frustrating, frequently insulting and moderately offensive exercise in gruesome misogynistic excess that’s made almost as if to convince pubescent 13-year-old boys it’s perfectly okay to treat women as ditzy dolls and little else.

For the most part Kingsman: The Secret Service is made with gleeful anarchic relish, and at no point during its 129-minute running time did I feel bored or offended. Featuring crackerjack action sequences, laugh-out-loud moments of humor and emotional beats that caught me off-guard, in a lot of ways Vaughn’s latest is right up there with his best work as a director, the end product showcasing a confident maturity that’s sometimes been absent from a few of his previous endeavors.