The King’s Man

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-

               I’m generally not a big fan of prequels, as their main purpose is usually to answer questions that I never asked in the first place. Despite that, I was somewhat optimistic about The King’s Man because I’m a huge fan of the first two Kingsman movies and the prequel is from the same director (Matthew Vaughn). However, while certainly not a bad film, this entry hit with a resounding “meh” rather than the over-the-top kickassery (if I may coin a word) of the first two movies. Unlike most prequels, the plot here is surprisingly interesting and the different cast of characters avoids the pitfall of inevitability that plagues most prequels. However, the execution is oddly inconsistent (especially considering that it is from the same director) and tonally out-of-step with its predecessors.

               The King’s Man tells the origin of the Kingsman organization and comes up with a surprisingly compelling backstory. Set during World War I, the film’s alternative history posits that the war was started by a Scottish supervillain in an effort to destroy England. The Scotsman’s criminal organization (think Spectre, but goofier) assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand to start the war, then convinces Russia to withdraw from the conflict and blackmails the President of the United States, preventing the U.S. from entering the war and allowing England to fall to Germany. A British aristocrat (played by Ralph Fiennes) leads a spy organization to prevent the destruction of England when normal military and political avenues have failed, eventually leading to the formation of the Kingsman organization that we know from the previous movies.

               The backstory is quite clever, as are all of the political machinations that go into the villain’s plot. However, even when considered as a standalone film, The King’s Man is all over the place and can never settle on a tone, often feeling like several different movies cobbled together rather than a cohesive story. At one moment, the film will be a lighthearted action adventure. At another moment, it will be an oddly serious war film showcasing the horrors of trench warfare in WWI (including an admittedly shocking death that I didn’t see coming). All of these scenes work when taken individually, but collectively seem inappropriately stitched together like a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie. Combined with an overly complicated plot that seems like it was lifted from a more straightlaced espionage thriller, the final result is a whiplash of tones that made me feel like I had just watched several movies in only two hours. It feels like watching 1917 and The Suicide Squad spliced together with one of the goofier Roger Moore Bond films. Just like Taco Bell and whisky, some things work better separately.

               The film is also oddly inconsistent with the prior entries in the series. Both of those movies are batshit crazy and revel in ridiculous violence and zany characters. This more stoic entry gives a final impression akin to finding out that Stripes and Saving Private Ryan are set in the same universe. Okay, not that extreme, but you get my drift. The only time that The King’s Man feels like it is part of its own universe is when our heroes travel to Russia to take down Rasputin, played in gloriously insane fashion by Rhys Ifans. The film’s trailers misleadingly portray Rasputin as the film’s main villain and it’s easy to see why; Ifans is the only villain to approach the craziness of Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore in the previous movies. If the trailers were more representative of the actual movie, then the final result would have been a more fitting entry in the series. As it is, the reveal of the actual big villain is predictable and anti-climactic, like watching Batman fight his way through the Mad Hatter or Mr. Freeze only to discover that the main villain is some henchman that nobody cares about.

               Ifans completely steals the show as Rasputin, but the other performances are solid, if a bit restrained. Fiennes is basically the substitute for Colin Firth from the prior movies and the substitution makes sense, swapping one typically stuffy English actor for another. But Fiennes often seems like he thinks he is in a far more serious film than he is, thus preventing the fun that Firth had playing with against-type wackiness. That problem is pretty consistent with the rest of the cast, as everyone seems oddly somber between periodic one-liners. The result is a group of performances that are as uneven as the script, making Ifans’s Rasputin seem like he is from a different (and more fun) movie.

               Interestingly, I’ve spoken to a couple of people that haven’t seen the first two Kingsman movies and they seem to enjoy this a lot more than people that are already fans of the series. That kind of makes sense. The King’s Man mostly fails to replicate the fun of the other movies, but it is a unique movie when considered by itself. The odd meshing of tones doesn’t really work for me, but the core idea works well enough when considered outside of the context of the series. If you haven’t seen Kingsman: The Secret Service or Kingsman: The Golden Circle, then I highly recommend checking them out. However, maybe you should watch this one first in order to get more enjoyment out of it. If you’ve already seen the others, then this will be a mildly disappointing, though occasionally entertaining, answer to questions that you never asked.

Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King’s_Man#/media/File:The_King’s_Man.jpg