Kingsman: The Secret Service and Kingsman: The Golden Circle are both over-the-top, violent, spectacles that position themselves somewhere between a real spy movie and a comedy poking fun at spy movies by sometimes pushing their clichés to the extreme. The mannered seriousness of some of the characters was essentially a joke next to the wild action and memorably bizarre villains. They were each pretty successful, so it is certainly not a surprise that there is now a prequel exploring the creation of the titular agency.
What is surprising about The King’s Man is that it has been made largely without the elements that made its predecessors entertaining. This is a more serious espionage thriller set during World War I, with humor that feels strangely subdued, characters with little personality and only a couple of fight scenes that stand-out. The first two had their issues for sure, but at least they weren’t boring.
The protagonist is the eventual founder of the super-secret Kingsman spy agency, the Duke of Oxford, a former soldier turned pacifist. The story concerns his efforts to stop a shadowy group attempting to use world leaders so they can control the war. He is played by Ralph Fiennes as though he doesn’t always realize how ridiculous this is. On the few occasions The King’s Man allows itself to go nuts, he shows some amusing physical comedy.
Sadly, it spends way too much time on its thin plot and the Duke’s relationship with his son. The latter is supposed to be emotional, adding personal stakes to the proceedings. Unfortunately, Conrad Oxford is blandly heroic, making it hard to care about someone who doesn’t feel fully written. If Conrad had been surrounded by wackiness, similar to the straight characters in Secret Service and Golden Circle, or shown a sense of humor, it could possibly have worked. The wackiness is too rare to make this entry exciting.
There are two sequences that showcase what this could have been. One involves a meeting between the Duke and Rasputin, who he suspects of manipulating the Russian Tsar for nefarious purposes. Rasputin is arrogant, intimidating, lecherous and kind of gross. He’s also very clever and shockingly graceful. Rhys Ifans more or less plays all of these traits at the same time, making Rasputin fascinating and unpredictable. He and Fiennes have several funny moments together.
The other is actually the final action set-piece. It deals with interesting logistics revolving around a mountaintop that is difficult to reach and a whole bunch of related things happening at once. It has a mildly chaotic feel to it that the rest of the movie lacks.
The action scenes are generally decent, but without a good story or engaging characters driving them, that only carries things so far. What is most curious is that, like the first two in the series, The King’s Man was directed/cowritten by Matthew Vaughn. The pacing is so different, the tone so uneven, that it feels more like it was made by someone trying to do an impression of Vaughn. It is much slower, its gags aren’t nearly as crazy and its villains aren’t given the chance to go bonkers like Samuel L. Jackson or Julianne Moore were. It is almost as if Vaughn thought his audience really wanted to learn about how the Kingsman agency was created and figured he needed to limit the fun stuff to focus on that. The result is too scattered and too light on the craziness to be enjoyable.
-Ben Pivoz
