OUT NOW: The King’s Man

Chronicling the events leading up to the founding of the Kingsman agency, The King's Man tells the story of Orlando, Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), a nobleman and pacifist committed to preventing conflict.

When the archduke Ferdinand is assassinated and the world is plunged into war, Orlando and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) are drawn into a global conspiracy to destroy the global world order.

With the support of his staff, Shola (Djimon Hounsou) and Polly (Gemma Arterton), Orlando goes on the trail of the villains, who have infiltrated the highest offices of the European powers.

Orlando's mission becomes all the more urgent when his son joins the war effort.

Can he save the world before it destroys itself?

I took this photo in 2019, before the film was delayed.

You know a franchise is on shaky ground when the third entry is a prequel.

The original movie is one I am torn on. On the one hand, it feels like a Verhoeven lens on Bond, with a clear eye on the power structures behind traditional notions of class.

On the other, I find it hyperactive and cheap in visual style. Part of it is the way CGI is used through the film - to touch up the violence, provide backdrops etc. There is something so overheated about Matthew Vaughn’s style as a director that I cannot completely get on board with. 

I think the original Kingsman is a good movie, with novelty and energy. Sadly, The King’s Man has neither of these qualities.

There is nothing about this prequel that feels new or exciting.

The acting is good - Fiennes brings pathos to the lead role and Rhys Ifans brings debauched menace to Rasputin - but nothing stands out. 

Matthew Vaughn’s casting can be spot-on, but he has a weakness for casting bland in his younger leads (Taron Edgerton aside). It might be the writing but Harris Dickinson welts against his older co-stars.

He is not bad but the film wants the viewer to buy into him and his relationship with his dad in a way that it completely fails to do. 

The original movie was based around Eggsy, who was an easy entry point to the world of Kingsman. 

He also comes in with the odds against him: He is a kid from a council estate - among the rich recruits, he is an outsider. He is an inbuilt point for audience empathy. 

There is no dynamic like that here and I found it difficult to invest in the Oxfords (Fiennes and Dickinson). 

The movie tries to create a contrast between Oxford and the rest of his class by emphasising his lack of prejudice (ala Harry Hart). 

 

Djimon Hounsou and Gemma Arterton play household staff who form the nucleus of Oxford’s spy apparatus. While servants are highlighted as the key cogs in Oxford’s spy games, it does not feel like a radical shift in power - it feels more like Sherlock Holmes and his vast network of contacts.

Honsou and Arterton are solid, but they are not in the movie that much. They are involved in the climax but I am struggling to recall any pivotal moves which are specifically theirs.

Despite the cast’s game efforts, the movie never picks up. It is not as indulgent as The Golden Circle but that is a small consolation.

The problem with the movie is that there is not enough story here. The movie wants to be about a father learning to let go of his child, but I am not sure that it works with the key turning point toward the end of the movie. Like all prequels, this movie is anchored to what was established in the original Kingsman.

At a certain point in the movie, Oxford jr has to die in order to facilitate the birth of the agency. I have criticized a lot of action movies for not putting their protagonists through the ringer, and I thought the way Oxford jr dies was appropriately messy (mistakenly shot by his own side). 

But something is not working.

The film has been trying to raise the stakes by tying into world events, but there is no sense of a ticking clock. The film tries to build pressure by referencing the naval blockade against the UK and the withdrawal of the Russians, but it does not convey that sense of building pressure.

I think the problem is that perspective stays with Oxford and people of his station. We only get a sense of the war’s consequences during young Oxford’s time at the front. 

Otherwise it feels like the true cost of the war is the collapse of the power structure which facilitated and ran the war. And it is hard to feel sympathetic for these institutions.

I am torn on the mysterious puppet master behind the film’s plot. While there is something pointed about a villain using established fault lines to bring the European powers to their knees, his role does lead to the film’s most misguided moves - major historical shifts are reduced to the work of individual power players. 

I think my ultimate issue with this movie is the way it treats history.

Having Kingsman tackling World War One is filled with landlines - it does lead to one of the film’s stronger set pieces but the movie feels torn between Bondian escapist fantasy and the realities of the ground war. 

It means that the movie features both a fight scene between a dancing Rasputin and an Englishman with a sword cane, AND serious sequences of characters’ mouthing cynically about the hypocrisy of the upper classes and waste of human life. This movie wants to have it all, but it all rings a bit hollow.

I also think that the desire to take the cost of war seriously means that the filmmakers dialed back on the sillier and more violent aspects of the series. 

The ultimate problem is that the founding of Kingsman makes for a great backstory in a Kingsman movie, it does not work for a film by itself - at least, this version of it does not.

The movie opens in a South African concentration camp, as though trying to undercut the cost and ripple effects of imperialism. But as the movie progresses, the film’s use of the real life context becomes more vague and less effective - the first Kingsman was blunt about what it means to have wealth and power; the ease with which the world’s elite join the Valentine’s scheme felt like a statement. This film never quite reaches the same place.

The founding of Kingsman is presented as a final triumph, but it comes with a bitter aftertaste - they intend to prevent future bloodshed but then sets up World War Two with a post-credit stinger as though announcing the next Avengers movie. Not only does it make the agency look ineffective, it cheapens the real horrors of the next Great War.

There is something disturbing by the simplification of history here - it renders whatever point it wants to make inert. And the film ends with a mid credit sting that is so wrongheaded it made me reconsider the film that preceded it. It is either a sting for what happened next or the worst sequel teaser in (movie) history.

The film also suffers in comparison to the original movie - while one or two of the set pieces are effective, nothing in this movie matches the inventiveness, humor or tension of the 2015 picture.

Vaughn apparently has plans for future installments. On this evidence, he is probably better off starting new projects.

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