The King's Man (2021)

After being delayed multiple times from a planned November 2019 release; Writer/Director Matthew Vaughn has released the third film in the “Kingsman “film series with “The King’s Man”. This time around the movie looks back to the origins of the society dedicated to peace and solving global conflicts before they can escalate.

In pre-World War I Europe; wealthy pacifist Orlando Oxford (Ralph Finnes); looks to raise his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson); following the tragic loss of his wife some years earlier on a Red Cross mission.

When events kick off the war; Conrad wishes to enlist and fight and his father is able to keep this from happening as he wants his son to avoid the horrors of war. At the same time; a secret Cabal has been plotting to start the war and manipulate the outcome and one of the agents named Rasputin (Rhys Ifans); looms prominently due to his influence over the Czar of Russia.

As the years pass and the war unfolds; Conrad and Orlando soon find themselves at odds and being pulled into opposite directions which sets a chain of events into action and puts the fate of the world in the balance.

The film is at times more retrained than the prior two films but the action sequences when they arrive are entertaining and mix the humor and violence that the series is known for. The cast is solid and the way that historical events were used but given an alternate perspective really added to the enjoyment of the film.

The movie does have a decent amount of humor but does spend a great deal of time on character development and exposition which can lead to some long gaps between the action, but the engaging stories and characters hold your interest throughout.

The film sets up further adventures in the Prequel timeline well and it appears that this is the direction that future films may go which would be more than fine as the film delivered what fans have come to expect from the series.

4 stars out of 5

This movie ended up being quite unique and not in a good way. The uniqueness comes from the fact that I actually agree with the critics rating at that abysmally woke, leftist and useless site Rotten Tomatoes that this movie is not very good. That I agree with that rubbish site is rare indeed.

As a standalone movie I probably would have rated it higher but as a movie in the Kingsman franchise I have to say that it was a disappointment.

The movie sets a quite different tone than the other Kingsman movies. This movie is quite gloomy. The story, which takes the history of the first world war and the Russian revolution and rewrites everything behind those events, is pretty ridiculous. The stories in the two previous Kingsman movies was no masterpieces but this historical rewrite is just wrong. Especially when playing with historical events that has caused more suffering than more or less anything else in modern history.

The coolness of the two previous movies is more or less gone. I cannot figure out if this movie tried to be serious or humorous but it fails on both accounts.

The Duke of Oxford’s overprotection of his son and his pacifism during most of the movie was just tiresome. What eventually happened to his son was rather predictable but the way they did it was like they where just trying to piss the audience off. Incredibly frustrating.

Then we have Rasputin. The entire Rasputin part was mostly alternating between silly and disgusting.

The Duke’s maid/nurse was a nice part though although the actor was not really very good in the role. Also, I am not sure that this “network of domestic servants” felt very plausible.

There were some outbursts of action that was not too bad. Especially towards the end when the Duke finally seemed to get his act together and drop this pacifist rubbish. I do however exclude most the world war scenes from the good action. They were just gloomy, sad and, at times, unrealistic and silly.

Overall this movie was just so unlike the other two movies, and not in a good way, that I really did not like it. It was not really fun to watch. As I wrote it was gloomy most of the time. As it used the events leading to world war one and the Russian revolution it was just one disastrous setback after each other. The only positive event in the movie was really at the end when the Duke of Oxford, founded the Kingsman agency.

Reading the synopsis one might get the idea about the Kingsman agency being created and I hoped more of the movie would have been about the actual creation but the movie is really two hours of long winded often gloomy, sometimes silly, drama and then there are less than two minutes where the Duke of Oxford proclaims the agency created. Not what I expected to be honest.

The King’s Man is a mostly harmless movie, unless you, like Rasputin, “consider being boring offensive”; if that’s the case, then you’re most likely going to want to demand satisfaction from co-writer/director Matthew Vaughn. This is an exceedingly long movie, yet it somehow can’t or won’t find the time or space to fit in a little logic.

Consider the following. A group of British citizens go to Moscow to kill Rasputin, whom they believe to be a pernicious influence on the Tsar – and that he is, but that doesn’t change the fact that Rasputin remains the Tsar’s closest and most trusted advisor. One would not expect the Russian monarch to be too keen on continuing his alliance with England if he knew a bunch of English covert agents just assassinated, with extreme prejudice, his right hand man. Fortunately he never finds out – or at least doesn’t appear to do so; the scene where the British cover up the murder and make it look like an accident or whatever has gone missing, presumably because it was never written, let alone shot.

Having said that, I rather liked Rasputin’s death scene, which recreates all manners of his fabled death (or, to be more specific, the myth surrounding it created by Prince Felix Yusupov); poison, beating, bullet wounds, and drowning in freezing water. This, by the way, is not a spoiler; first because it happens halfway through the movie (and in this case “halfway” means there’s still a very long way to go), and second because his legendary demise is so well known it even has a trope named after it.

You know what else would not be a spoiler? The identity of the criminal mastermind behind the nameless organization – I would suggest OWCA (Organization Without a Cool Acronym), were it not already taken – intent on wreaking havoc upon the world; identity which I will not reveal because it should be readily apparent to anyone familiar with the Law of Economy of Characters (in which a seemingly minor or unimportant character turns out to be much more crucial to the plot than they first appear to be). I will only add that the villain’s uncanny ability to impossibly go from point A to a point beyond the alphabet, aided by little more than the requirements of the script, produces a plot hole so big a submarine could pass through it – and literally does.

So, I did not expect this movie. Way darker than the previous ones. Still with humour, though. I really enjoyed it. Really well made. Good effects, good acting, surprising storyline. Did not find anything annoying, whicj rarely happens. I really like this one best of the three Kingsman.