Mark Reviews Movies: THE KING'S MAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 21, 2021

The King's Man, a prequel to Kingsman: The Secret Service and its sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, details the origins of the series' fictional private intelligence service, set against figures and events from actual history. There's an uncharacteristic seriousness to this installment, which gets into the political backdrop that resulted in the mostly pointless slaughter of the Great War. Given how cheeky and vicious the previous entries in this franchise have been, it's difficult to trust co-writer/director Matthew Vaughn's new approach to and tone within this installment.

The movie itself doesn't help too much in that regard, either. Here, we first meet Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), a nobleman and veteran of the British Empire's colonization efforts in the 19th century, who has become a pacifist and an ambassador for the Red Cross by the start of the 20th century. While providing aid to prisoners of the Boer War in South Africa in 1902, Orlando's wife is killed by a sniper, leaving him to raise the couple's son on his own.

Twelve years later, Orlando has dedicated himself to protecting Conrad (Harris Dickson), his now-teenaged son, from the horrors of the world, although Orlando's right-hand man Shola (Djimon Hounsou) trains the kid in fighting with knives, while Conrad's nanny Polly (Gemma Arterton) shoots at the pair with precise, if wholly irresponsible, aim. Conrad wants to join the army, and since you of course have done the math here, you also know there'll be a reason for the empire to need more soldiers soon.

At this point, the screenplay, written by Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek, offers some clever, albeit rather dry, insertions of our main characters into the history of the war. Orlando and Conrad are in the car, for example, when an assassin kills Archduke Franz Ferdinand (and his wife, whose death is almost as much of an afterthought as the death of Orlando's wife, which basically continues the series' attention to and consideration for women in its stories—or, better, the lack thereof).

Orlando also has more or less a direct line to King George V (Tom Hollander), who tries to reason with his cousins Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany II and Russian Tsar Nicholas II, whose childhood bickering is about to be unleashed as an international conflict. The other rulers, by the way, are also played by Hollander, in a casting stunt that begins as a gag, which is quickly forgotten.

The whole movie teases at the winking, knowing humor that defined its predecessors, but Vaughn seems strangely unwilling or unable to take advantage of the potential jokes he establishes. Hollander's triple casting is one, but so, too, is the portrayal of Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), the so-called "mad monk" who has almost supernatural control over Nicholas, is a student of ballet (A big fight has him gracefully spinning around the room with his blade), and a stubborn refusal to die.

Trying to kill Rasputin, whose plan is to convince the tsar to leave the conflict and the British Empire without an ally, is Conrad's first mission in the soon-to-be Kingsman, the secret intelligence service Orlando has established to prevent his son from, well, fighting and killing and possibly being killed in political squabbles that turn to conflict. It's best not to think too deeply—or at all—about the movie's obvious ideological inconsistencies (A mid-credits scene introduces a villain for the prequel's seemingly inevitable sequel, and if this movie's approach to treating history with unconvincing sincerity is any indication, the revelation leaves one only with looming dread).

Beneath the story's encyclopedia-summary presentation of history, there's a bit of dishonest avoidance of political history (The war isn't a matter of nationalistic fervor but, instead, is a plot by a shadowy, independent organization of ne'er-do-wells, with the leader kept in literal shadow for a not-so-surprising twist). While there's a pretty blatant anti-war message to be found here (Conrad ends up in the frontline trenches, which are built up in an impressive but, for the point to really be made, far too showy time-lapse shot), the movie's increasing reliance on action and violence that starts to make us wonder if Vaughn and Gajdusek have been paying attention to their own narrative. A final assault on the main villain's mountaintop not-so-stronghold gives us a cliffhanger, preceded by a plane-hanger, and a few routine fights.

In theory, the reconfigured tone and approach toward history marks an intriguing turn for this series. The King's Man, though, is so thin, shallow, and uncertain of itself that the result is mostly dull and wholly inconsistent.

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