Bond Villain Stupidity: When Whiskey confronts Harry and Eggsy he has a clear shot at the open laptop, but instead chooses to demand them to hand it over. He could also have taken several shots at the case throughout his fight and with his weapon being fairly high caliber it seems unlikely the exterior could have kept the bullet from penetrating to the hardware, let alone his whip, shown to be able to cut through cable-car grade glass, from simply slicing it up.
On the other hand, this is a universe with bullet-proof umbrellas no thicker than regular umbrellas, electro-whips, remote-controlled hacking-capable robot arms, blue gel bombs that can freeze an army, and suits that are bulletproof without compromising style. For all Whiskey knows, the laptop hardware is kitted out to survive armor-piercing rounds and set to release sarin or something if you shoot it. Maybe he thought it best to just have the thing in hand instead of taking any action that risked setting off a booby-trap (he could see just handling it wouldn't, since his opponents had already touched it), especially since he didn't need to destroy it — just keep anyone from using it for a few hours. And during the fight, even if he wanted to shoot it, he was probably rather busy fighting.
Also, he already had one character at his mercy but decided to monologue rather than just end him.
Hacking the Unhackable
Forgot About His Powers: Eggsy has his magical hacking wristwatch which he used only moments prior to hack a mechanical arm - something that should definitely not be hackable - but when they get to Poppy and her laptop-suitcase, they suddenly need her to tell them the password for something that could be easily hacked.
Granted, Eggsy, Harry and Merlin don't know about that, but the mines are remote-controlled by computer, which means they could have tried to hack them…
Mecha-dogs are computers too. Why didn't Eggsy just hack the second one?
Takes time to hack the device, they may have also been able to do so because they already had the first arm. The mines, again they didn't know. The dogs may have ripped them apart before hand.
Something of a stretch but the mines themselves look like old technology that factored in with the unknown remote set-up and range of the watch made the situation what it was.
When Eggsy and Merlin went up against Valentine, they were blindsided by Valentine's program running on biometrics, meaning Eggsy had to fight his way back in. Maybe Eggsy just figured Poppy would have had similar security on the briefcase and didn't want to waste any time trying.
Why didn't Merlin just stay hidden? It's not like Harry and Eggsy couldn't have beaten those five Mooks on their own.
Did Merlin know that? What if there was hundreds of mooks to go through.
Did Merlin know what? That Harry and Eggsy were skilled enough agents to take out the less than a dozen mooks that his trick with the bomb took out? I don't see why he'd think otherwise and it's not as if he thought he was taking out a larger amount, because he was looking right at the group of guards who had been guarding the gate when he stepped off the mine. Furthermore, the mine going off alerted everyone in Poppy's organization to the fact that something was wrong, making any kind of sneak assault impossible from that moment on.
Considering the only real way in was through the front where the guards were to begin with, and they didn't have a plan to sneak in, and were low on time to the point where people may have died already, I don't think a sneak assault was exactly the plan to begin with.
The real headscratcher about the mine is why it didn't go off when it was stepped on, like pretty much all antipersonnel mines are designed to do. As mentioned already, the mine going boom is an excellent way to alert the minelayer that enemies are nearby, while waiting for the victim to step off just gives them an opportunity to defuse the mine or find a sufficient rock to put in their place.
Poppy is pretty crazy, so she may have insisted that her mines be armed by the weight of a person and triggered when that weight is lifted. She based the aesthetic of her HQ entirely on a mass media portrayal of the '50s, so she may have just wanted her mines to work like they often do in movies.
Well, that was a great big nothin'.
All for Nothing: What exactly was the point of Poppy's plan? Let's assume that neither Kingsmen nor Statesmen intervene.
Scenario A: The president of USA passes the bill in time. Result: There is a new market of recreational drugs, but do you really think anyone will be willing to buy anything from a dealer who nearly killed all of its consumer base? Do you really think there won't be any consequences from the failed attempt to murder millions of people?
Her second demand was immunity for herself and her organisation. Poppy was already a multi-billionaire — what she wanted most of all was legitimacy. If the President agreed to her demands, she'd be free to live wherever and do whatever she wanted, and flaunt the outrageous amount of money she made as a legitimate businesswoman.
Until she is arrested by one of the scores of countries where the president has no authority to grant immunity, or Congress simply declares war on her organization.
Not to mention, there is such a thing as coercion. The president could simply agree to her demands, wait for her to show up, and arrest her anyway. Any bill or action signed granting her immunity would be laughed out of court as being the product of the most public and wide-scale case of duress in legal history.
Or immediately just plain shot by somebody whose loved one died from an extra-intense reaction to the toxin. Or a CIA (or any other Alphabet Agency) agent.
Scenario B: The president's plan to let drug users die out works. Now all of your clients are dead, Poppy. How are you going to profit from that again?
Poppy may have a wide drug network, but she could hardly have spread her contaminated drugs to every supplier on the planet, so there may still be a few addicts/users out there who would use drugs, and she could probably set up a few new dummy corporations to sell her product without 'fear' of reprisals.
I don't think Scenario B counts as a flaw any more than any other "holding the world hostage" plan usually does- it is always possible for your would-be Bond villain to offer a credible threat and have a list of demands, yet for your target to decide to let you go through with it anyway (albeit usually out of less evil reasons); her thinking was that if the President DIDN'T give in to her demands, then not only would millions be dead, but the President himself would be held just as accountable as she, and given that he ends up arrested at the end, that was a reasonable enough assumption. Her only flaw was the normally unlikely possibility of the guy who comes to power being a murderous idiot, and honestly since the President had no idea how to find her or seriously harm her organisation (nor any obvious plans to) she could have come up with a new plan, waited for a more reasonable President to replace this one, or taken revenge by having him murdered for screwing her over, all of which would work out for her in the long run. Worst comes to worst, her plan fails...and she is STILL the richest and most powerful criminal in history, just with much more notoriety (which might honestly be a decent substitute prize anyway).
And to address the whole 'be willing to buy anything from a dealer who nearly killed all of its consumer base' arguement: addiction is a hell of a cruel mistress. Certainly some people would be able to get clean from the drug of their choice but others aren't going to be able to.
First off, even if they manage to get clean once, for some people the situations that led them to use in the first place will still be there. Fox said she'd started using to keep up with her stressful workload: that's certainly reality for plenty of other people and that's still going to be there even if they get clean. Eventually they'd reconsider using again to make it easier on them.
Secondly, there are people out there that do drugs to treat chronic pain, and that's certainly not going to go away even if they get clean, so they may go back to using just to cope.
Third, even if every victim in the world decided to kick the habit, that's going to overload the already strained rehab industry, and that'll probably lead to waiting lists to get treatment, and for some people, it'd just be easier to keep using.
And fourth, thinking about all this, it's very possible there's one drug category Poppy didn't get to taint: prescription painkillers. Since those are made by legitimate pharmaceutical companies, and used for legitimate treatments, they probably didn't get tainted by the virus, and that'd probably lead to more common prescription drug abuse since some of those users would just switch to those drugs.
And finally, at some point there will be potential users that won't remember and/or weren't even alive during this crisis, and therefore think it wasn't as bad as they make it out to be or that it won't happen to them. So if Poppy plays the long game (which it's obvious she would, this movie was the culmination of a long game for her), even if she lost a big chunk of her customers, a new chunk will grow up at some point.
And situations like these ALWAYS have conspiracy theorists and truthers so someone will paint Poppy as the good guy, especially since the president was exposed as attempting to let them die: someone will theorize that Poppy was a scapegoat and the US Government were really the ones that planted the virus. So THEY are likely to keep using too, if any of them are users.
Still even though not everyone would get clean or stop using them to manage pain this would devastate the drug industry. Recreational drug use would effectively stop, people needing them for pain would try to buy black market medication, addicts would turn to legal highs. Also drugs would cease to have any of the social acceptance they’ve gained over the last few decades, making it even harder for dealers. Poppy would effectively loose her drug empire after this.
And on the note of the President, how the heck did HE think this was actually going to work out for him? His whole plan was to pretend to give in to Poppy's demands without even making a token effort to try and stop her. Even if his advisor hadn't been cured and outed him, he'd STILL be seen as the President who folded to terrorism and got countless people killed, and that's assuming he was able to cover up the fact that he didn't actually comply with her demands, in which case he becomes known as the president who LET terrorists kill millions worldwide, either way would probably end with him impeached anyway. And that's not even going into possible international repercussions (since people around the world, not just in the US, were affected), ESPECIALLY if it got out that he'd let the infected die.
He could have told some cover up story about the secret service trying something that didn't work and brought up the "don't negotiate with terrorists" policy as an official excuse not to give in for real.
It's possible he had a Freudian Excuse about being abused by a loved one with a drug habit leading to despising and wanting to kill them all. It might have been his second term or he simply didn't care about re-election, it was personal. And because he was pretending to negotiate with Poppy, the public wouldn't know that he deliberately let them die.
Poppy overlooked something
Here's a good one; why would a drug dealer as successful as Poppy not realize that the illegality of her product is the only reason its profit margins are so high? In opium-growing countries, a family working constantly can produce roughly 20 kilos of raw material a year, which merchants purchase for a hundred dollars a kilo. A skilled chemist can turn that into ten thousand doses of heroin, each with a street value of about a hundred dollars. Result: A million dollars. For a hundred bucks of plant sap, gathered by unskilled labor. That's a TEN THOUSAND PERCENT MARKUP.note just to beg forgiveness, this formula is of the drug trade in The '90s; adjust as needed If it was legal, you could probably slice at least two zeroes off of that, possibly more, and do little to expand client base because the hard stuff is pretty damn hazardous, which limits the number of consumers each generation to a set number of stupid, suicidal people. Legalization would annihilate the drug trade because drugs are a cheap product with its demand artificially inflated by drug enforcement; technically, Poppy should consider drug-banning governments to be her most devoted allies, blindly dumping money on her head. Hell, her spy villain organization is ridiculously understaffed; Kingsman sells a couple hundred $5000 suits a year and can afford a nice big base thanks to old money and investments, Statesman sells a couple hundred thousand bottles of $80 whiskey every year and has skyscrapers in every major city in America, but most drug cartels make more money than the whole of Silicon Valley, which should permit her to field her own private armies.Plural.
She wanted recognition as a "legit" bussinesswoman, and even if she loses money in the long run, she still has millions on her.
So why didn't the people who work for Poppy catch on that she's about to destroy their entire industry, and depose her so as to preserve their collective profit margins? Surely they'd do the math and realize how insane her scheme and leadership in general is, such that having anyone else in charge would be better. Especially if she makes it a routine practice to have them chow down on burgers made out of their buddies.
That's a very easy one: in her organization, her word is absolute. Disobey her, or question her, and you will, at best, get stuffed into the meat grinder. She took time to make sure no one would be alive to challenge her rule. Even Elton John, who was getting off lightly (just a bit of torture every time he doesn't watch his mouth), got a death sentence the moment he did anything even remotely interfering with her plans.
Did they or did they not know?
If Eggsy’s friends didn’t know about his spy work for Kingsmen, how did they think he’d started his relationship with Princess Tilde?
They might not have known she was a princess.
I think they knew, but really easy enough to say Eggsy lucked out and met her in a different fashion. Tilde is clearly not so posh, she could be at a bar or club.
If Eggsy working at Kingsman the tailor shop is his cover, it's not too farfetched to say he met her through that either, either by her looking for something for her father or even getting her own outfit there, if suits are her thing.
Harry's "Hmm?" moment
How and why did Harry suspect Whiskey was a Rogue Agent?
He saw Whiskey intentionally knock the antidote out of Eggsy's hands. This trained agent could have easily pushed Eggsy out of the way without destroying the antidote. Now Harry thought he was working for Poppy or the President. Remember the last film, Arthur was flipped and he may have been a tad paranoid after being informed.
Also, given he's still feeling the aftereffects of being shot in the head, Eggsy might not be entirely wrong that Harry's thinking is a bit wonky.
There was also a bit where the Statesmen were listening to the POTUS saying he is going to let the people die. Whiskey says that they shouldn't make this personal and in that conversation Whiskey and Harry make eye contact, so that could have planted the seeds.
The Mole
How did Whiskey plan to get away with his Face–Heel Turn? After all, he's a Statesman agent who, if they're anything like the Kingsmen, would have Mission Control (Ginger) tracking his every move. He said that one of his goals is to destroy the drug business all over the world so that the alcohol business would skyrocket, benefiting the Statesmen. But even so, Champagne wouldn't approve of Whiskey letting all junkies die just to increase the already high profit. And Whiskey most likely had to kill Eggsy and Harry in order to achieve his goal. Even if there isn't anyone tracking his actions, how would he explain the 'mission failure' to his boss? He would've been demoted if not outright fired for failing a very important mission that results in millions of people dying, not to mention two (three if you count Merlin) fellow agents.
The financial aspect was only a cover. The real reason why he wanted all drug users dead was because his wife was killed by a pair of junkies. He had very personal reasons and likely didn't care what the Statesmen would think of him afterwards, or even what would have happened to him.
Merlin was able to track the actions of Kingsman agents through their glasses broadcasting what they saw. Whiskey wasn't wearing glasses in the final scenes, so presumably they don't have a similar setup, or he was at least smart enough to disable it. I actually don't think it would be too difficult for him to sell the idea that he simply arrived too late to help anyone - if he'd managed to kill Eggsy and Harry, there'd be no one and no way to contradict his story that the Kingsmen died in their assault on the compound.
More Antidote
Why, why didn't Eggsy grab more than one antidote? The case containing the antidotes is right in front of him and everyone is too distracted by Charlie when he recognizes Eggsy. He has more than enough time to pick up not just one or two vials, but a whole case of antidote if he wanted to. Taking just one vial means he'd have to be extra careful not to break it and protect it with his life all the way back to the Statesman base, something he didn't do a very good job as a later scene showed.
Are these films meant to be completely logical? Harry states in the first movie that Kingsman operates at the "highest level of discretion". Then, this superspy presumably in his fifties or older, among the agency's most proficient and experienced, goes overboard in his meeting with Valentine, giving away that he's totally a spy when his job is to pretend to not be a spy. In the church scene, again — "highest level of discretion", so what was Harry's plan if the bigoted lady reacted the way she indeed did to his "Catholic whore" remark? They knew Valentine was somewhere in the area, and Harry on the receiving end of an outburst would've certainly drawn attention. I don't think these films are meant to be completely logical.
The official novellisation actually does have Eggsy grab a whole case, it's just that all but one get broken during the escape.
A whole box or even multiple may have been too cumbersome to carry if he were to get into a gunfight.
A new agent?
Why is Tequila joining the Kingsmen? What brought this on? Is he intending to help them rebuild? If so, couldn't he stay a Statesman?
It's very likely that Tequila is just working alongside Kingsman as a sort of ambassador to cement the ties between both organizations. Ginger would've probably been a better choice as she technically worked longer with them, but she's probably training the new Ginger so she can assume the Whiskey moniker.
Consider the following: Kingsman is now down to two people, neither of whom are really qualified to train new recruits, and neither of whom would have time to train anyone, since one would be rebuilding the organization as a whole, and the other would be preparing for marriage. Tequila may have gotten a transfer (at least a temporary one) to fill that gap.
It would also help maintain the cover story of Kingsman being a simple tailor shop that just invested in a scotch distillery with Statesman if an employee of Statesman-the-distillery was now working in the UK to make sure their investment runs smoothly, and of course he'd be seen often with the other major investor.
It's likely that someone, perhaps Champ, Ginger, or even Tequila himself, thought it'd be a good idea to get him away from whoever or whatever was tempting him to do drugs.
At any rate, would it have been unusual for him to become a Kingsman? Champ wanted one of the Galahads to be his new Whiskey before Ginger Jumped at the Call.
Also: let's face it, the cowboy hat and longcoat would've stuck out in London, and the last thing a spy wants to do is stick out.
Remember what Champagne says at the very end of the film regarding the Kingsman maybe being able to smarten Tequila up a bit. Champ was getting fed up with Tequila's lack of decorum throughout the film and decided to take the opportunity to make his agent grow up a little. This would be an Ironic Echo of Tequila's introduction where he says Southerners get their politeness from the British but that the British didn't keep any for themselves.
Where did she go?
So whatever happened to Amelia? Or other Kingsman branches outside Britain? In the first film, Harry said that Amelia is part of the Berlin branch, so it means Kingsman has bases of operations in other countries as well, yet when Poppy sends her missiles to destroy them, her screen only shows targets in Britain. How are Eggsy and Merlin the only surviving agents then?
Perhaps other Kingsman targets were hit offscreen and Poppy was just focusing on the main locations in Britain.
The other branches mostly seem to be support staff, rather than trained field agents. In any case, rallying them for some kind of response would have probably been their Plan B if they hadn't figured out what the Doomsday Protocol was supposed to be about.
Detecting a missile but no stopping the missile
So the Kingsman's home can detect incoming missile, but there is absolutely no counter-measure? Then what's the point of knowing that in the 1st place?
For the same reason missile defense systems in real life have limited opportunities to intercept a missile. If you look at the map Poppy had, the missiles were launched (presumably from UAV) from off the coastline. Even if they aren't skimming to avoid radar detection (another RL aspect that is perfectly capable), there are missiles are capable of moving in excess of the speed of sound. It doesn't sound like much, but you need a system to pick up said missile in the first place, calculate variables such as velocity, altitude, heading, etc, and use an appropriate response (interception missile, CIWS, etc), all of which needs to be calculated in real time with a rapidly decreasing window. If anything, it looks like Poppy had launched the missiles from inside the detection range Kingsmen had, and they only picked them up when they gained altitude to initiate a precise strike. And she DID have full access to their information thanks to Charlie's arm...
The Kingsmen are eliminated via a barrage of missiles that strike locations all over Britain. Firstly, don't modern countries, especially ones like the UK, have air defense systems that would detect and shoot down the missiles? Second, even if you somehow say that these are stealth missiles or that the Golden Circle has shut down the defense network (not entirely implausible, given the reach we see they have in the rest of the film), wouldn't this be seen as a major terrorist attack/act of war that the entire world would go into a frenzy over? You'd think that at least some degree of disruption would be evident, especially considering one character is a head of state.
Honestly, the bigger headscratcher for me is how were Eggsy and Merlin the only survivors? How did Poppy manage to fire those missiles at the exact time that all other Kingsmen were at home or at HQ? You would think someone else would've been in the field or even just getting groceries or something. Someone calculate the odds on that, I really want to know how unlikely she got.
Most likely because Poppy didn't expect Eggsy to not be present at the Kingsman meeting in lieu of his date with Tilde, and as Merlin has stated, Merlin's personal address was not recorded in the Kingsman network. So it was basically dumb luck that saved the two.
I still want the odds. I'm arguing dumb luck should've saved someone else too.
There may be other survivors that they just didn't have time to rally before going to Kentucky. Their first priority was the Doomsday Protocol, and even then, they didn't know exactly what they were looking for when they headed to the US.
Not attempting math on exact odds, but it's only about a dozen people she was trying to kill. It's also clear that she bombed 1) meeting places like the shop on Saville Row, 2) large support bases which could be expected to house field agents like the mansion in the countryside, and 3) private homes like Eggsy/Harry's place. Charlie's arm presumably downloaded itineraries, so they might have known the Kingsmen were having that meeting, and even if the Kingsmen switched up their meeting times just in case, the arm also probably knew if anybody was out on a mission or not, and it didn't look like anyone was in the field at the time. Poppy could then assume that the Kingsmen field agents were most likely to be in one of the three types of places she destroyed. While it's possible another agent could have gone out to dinner or something, that might not be something they do a lot, especially since they're not supposed to be involved in relationships (not dating would lower the probability of being out at dinner, and do most of those guys look like they do their own shop?), and Charlie knows how all of these guys think and behave. Eggsy is an atypical agent who went out to have dinner with his girlfriend, so in doing something pretty much none of the other agents would ever do, he got lucky.
Eggsy not being home is an easy miss considering Poppy targeted the above mentioned places. The bigger issue is Merlin. If Poppy has all the information about missions and meetings, she should know that Merlin is not invited. She also has all the agents' home addresses, but she doesn't seem to notice that there are n number of agents and one less home address?
Charlie could've easily assumed that Merlin just lived at HQ, which was targeted.
Merlin isn't an agent. He specifically points out that "staff" apparently weren't considered important enough for Poppy to target, so it's not her fault. I would say Charlie slipped up in not making an exception for Merlin, since Charlie should know how useful and dangerous his ex-trainer is. Possibly the above explanation about Charlie thinking Merlin lived HQ factored in, or maybe Charlie figured that without the support of any field agents, Merlin's powers would be limited. After all, Charlie didn't expect Eggsy to survive.
About that....
How exactly did the world spin the fact that hundreds of people in places of authority died simultaneously, hundreds more were kidnapped and then rescued, and keep the Kingsmen secret?
It is a good possibility that only the upper, upper echelons were in on the whole "murder most of the world" plot along with people Valentine thought were "important" but not compliant, such as Iggy Azalea and Princess Tilde, we don't actually know how many of the people Valentine visited were compliant in his scheme, for every 1 pro genocider there might have been like 5-6 non compliers, also a quick provisional goverment might have been set up once the freed government officals and royalty started finding bunkers full of headless politicians and mutlicoloured brain matter, then its just a matter of the provisional govenment running things on auto until proper elections can take place, after a year alot can happen.
Charlie washed out of Kingsmen because he failed the loyalty test. Why weren't there any precautions in place to keep him from talking given the fact that they threw him out because he had proven that he'd sell them out for his own benefit?
It's hinted in the first movie that he was Arthur's candidate. And given by then Arthur was compromised by Valentine, it's likely he lied about Charlie getting those precautions and sent him over to Valentine in secret.
Poppy's plans, again
Why didn't Poppy just contact only the President when she gave her speech? As several have mentioned, even if she ended up getting what she wanted, her buyers wouldn't dare touch her drugs anymore out of fear that they'll be getting a deadly virus, but this is because she broadcasts her entire plan for all of the world to know. If she had just contacted the president, then the drug users would be none the wiser as to just how they came into contact with a deadly disease. Sure, Idiot Ball and all that, but what would be the explicable reason for Poppy to do this?
Perhaps her technology would only be untraceable once so she multitasked the conversation seeing as calling out the president publicly was what she may have wanted and contacting POTUS privately would potentially backfire.
It was likely to put pressure on the President. There are basically two outcomes she saw from this: A. She gets the recognition she wants and is deemed a legitimate business woman, and would thus stop tainting her supplies since there is no reason to hold her customers essentially hostage with the virus. Or B. The POTUS refuses and ends up in a giant pile of trouble for basically signing the death warrants for everyone who had touched drugs. Sure, it's her drugs and she's the one who tainted them with the virus, but the President would still come under a lot of pressure if he outright said 'no' since he would be letting not only millions of his own citizens but millions of people from other countries die. She did not forsee that the President would choose a third option.
And, in addition to the above, how the heck did none of the world's intelligence agencies managed to track down the signal from Poppy's broadcast? That might just be the most frustrating plot hole in the movie for me. She manages to somehow hijack worldwide network and use it to broadcast her speech (and this is after somehow bombing the Kingsmen bases with no retaliation at all) with nobody that can track down the signal.
In universe other agencies might be pretty much useless, or they wouldn't need the likes of Kingsmen and Statesmen. Same as the Marvel Universe. If the police were competent, they wouldn't need superheroes.
We can assume the message itself was pre-recorded and was broadcast from a decoy base from somewhere far from Poppy's real base. Meaning even if the signal was tracked down, it would lead to a dead end.
The timeskip?
How long did it take between the climax and the epilogue that the President's impeachment was already concluded by the time the epilogue takes place?
I'd imagine quite a few months, considering a royal wedding is also taking place. Those take months to plan, especially those with the word in front of it.
Does he stay or does he retire?
How will Eggsy keep working as a secret agent now that he's a Prince Consort of Sweden?
Earlier scenes showed that his duties as a Kingsman heavily conflicted with his personal life, up to and including his need to seduce a target causing bad friction with Tilde. Odds are, Eggsy is retired from Kingsman and the sequel (Vaughn is intending to do a trilogy and current box office pulls has it all but locked) and the sequel will probably follow Channing Tatum and Colin Firth.
He worked closely with Merlin in both movies, likely more closely than Harry ever had. It's possible he could transition into a support role like that, instead of working in the field. Until the next catastrophe happens and forces him into the field, as happened with Merlin, at least.
The President's plans
So the President's plan for dealing with the millions of infected drug users is to heard them into facilities like sporting arenas and schools, and lock every individual in a human-sized cage, stack those cages up to the roof, and leave them there to die. Where exactly is he getting all those millions of cages? Did he have them ready and waiting, just in case something like this happened? And how did he get construction cranes into a sporting arena so quickly? It can take anywhere from 3 to 10 days to assemble a crane in a space like that. What were the logistics of dealing with those millions of dead bodies going to look like? Would there have been a system in place for people to collect the remains of their loved ones? Was the plan to dig mass graves and hope the virus couldn't live in the soil or the water table? Cremation?
The first movie's plot revolved around a tech mogul using murderphones and technicolor brain bombs and a henchwoman who could sneak up on a professional spy on a hardwood floor using metal blades for feet. So Bellisario's Maxim is in full effect here.
That's not exactly how detonators work?
If the mines aren't detonated until after the weight is removed, why didn't Merlin have Eggsy wait for a minute while he found a rock, and then place THAT on the detonator, thus insuring nobody had to die? We know that the mines aren't weight specific since presumably Merlin and Eggsy weigh different amounts, so just getting something else that has weight should have worked just as well as Merlin doing it himself.
The answer's in the Fridge Brilliance category: time. They needed to hurry to save as many lives as possible: trying to find a rock would waste time they didn't have.
Then why not just leave him there? The guards he blew up wouldn't have caused them much trouble so they simply could have returned later.
Bloodless meat?
How does the meat that comes out of the giant grinder not have any blood or bits of bone, hair, or clothing in it?
It's called mechanical deboning of meat, there are processors that separate meat from inedible parts relatively well. Poppy's machine is suspiciously small but it's not that unrealistic.
There's a vent on the side that spits out the clothing, at least.
Shouldn't the rope be cut
During the ending fight, why was the lasso able to drag Eggsy into the meat grinder instead of the lasso immediately being cut by, ya know, THE MEAT GRINDER?
The same way my daughter's skipping ropes get tangled around the blade in my lawn mower instead of being chewed up by the blade of the lawnmower. This kind of thing actually happens quite often - loose clothing or hair can easily pull people into dangerous equipment.
Make your arm asplode?
How does a charge in Charlie's neck blow off his arm?
Dislodge the chip embedded on his body allowing it to be forced by the motion of the fight and subsequent drop down toward his shoulder. At which point his chip detonates like everyone else but because of the comparatively small shift in location it didn't asplode his head just his shoulder joint.
The antidote plan
Could the plan to steal the antidote have actually worked? Let's assume the plan to get a vial of the antidote went without a hitch and they get it back to Statesman HQ. How were they planning to analyze the potion, produce it in huge quantities (what might even have required some rare materials they obviously wouldn't have) and distribute it all around the world within the few hours they had until the mass dying began?
Who survives that?!
How did Charlie survive the Valentine incident at all? Given he isn't seen by Eggsy or Merlin escaping during the fight between Eggsy and Valentine's bodyguard suggesting that he was, presumably, unconscious during this fight. If his arm and vocal cords were destroyed he would be bleeding heavily, if he was unconscious for however long Eggsy was still at the compound how did he avoid dying of blood loss, not to mention escape Valentine's remote bunker with only one arm and no help because everyone else is dead?
Ambiguous question
During Whiskey's cabin fight, Harry says that "I know what I'm seeing". What exactly was he seeing?
How did Poppy get to where she is without being murdered in her sleep?
She's an extremely creepy Stepford Smiler who requires her minions to kill and eat their former employers as part of initiation to her organization. That may be enough to terrify most people into obedience, but it does absolutely nothing to inspire genuine loyalty. Her initiation procedure selects for people who are willing to kill and eat their boss when their life is threatened while simultaneously making it clear that they're one little mistake away from You Have Outlived Your Usefulness themselves. In other words she's cultivating a workforce who has every reason to want her dead. And she doesn't seem to be particularly careful either, considering that when she fed Angel his boss burger that he was easily close enough to dive over the counter and snap her neck before her robot dogs could hope to cross the room and intervene. All it would take is one new inductee to decide they'd rather die than become a cannibal and she'd be toast.
