Movie Review: ‘The King’s Man’

by | Dec 21, 2021 | Featured, Movie Reviews, Movies | 0 comments

Review by James Lindorf

Tony and BAFTA award-winning actor Ralph Fiennes has played the sophisticated gentleman spy John Steed in the British version of “The Avengers” and M in the latter rough and tumble Daniel Craig Bond movies. He gets the chance to combine those two worlds in “The King’s Man,” the latest entry in Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman franchise. On December 22nd, Vaughn takes audiences back to World War I and the origin of the greatest independent international intelligence agency ever.

At least one thing all great directors have in common; you can watch a movie and know they were the ones behind its creation. Vaughn is a visionary who blends action, hyper-violence, and humor into a style all his own. You can love or hate what he does, but you can’t deny he has a consistent storytelling style. This is only Matthew Vaughn’s seventh feature film, but he has had a firm handle on his style since he made “Layer Cake” seventeen years ago. He was on a meteoric rise over four years with “Kick-Ass,” “X-Men: First Class,” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” He followed up that hot streak with a sequel to “Kingsman” that failed to live up to expectations, and it has been four years since we last saw him in theaters. We know the vibe will be right but is the story of “The King’s Man” worth the trip to the theater this holiday season?

We know that at least for this project, Vaughn has moved on from his long-time writing collaborator Jane Goldman who has worked with him on his last five movies. Maybe she was busy writing the live-action “The Little Mermaid,” or perhaps he felt he needed a change after “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.” This time he brought in Karl Gajdusek, who is best known for writing thrillers like “Trespass,” “Oblivion,” and “The November Man.” He hasn’t had overwhelming success with those movies, but action and suspense are elements he is used to working with. What isn’t clear is if Gajdusek and Vaughn worked together or if Vaughn took a script that Gajdusek wrote and adapted it to the franchise. That latter option seems slightly more likely because this is the first time the Kingsman has dealt with real-world issues. This is also the least fun and charismatic entry in the series. There is a chance that feeling could be chalked up to the lack of Taron Egerton, the lead of the first two movies.

Vaughn sought to replace Taron with Harris Dickinson, who isn’t bad. Still, his character Conrad Oxford, another young, headstrong blonde, brings nothing to the story compared to Egerton’s Eggsy. Conrad is so single-minded in defending his country on the battlefield that it leaves little room for anything else. In an interview with Collider, Vaughn discussed having to cut an hour out of this 131-minute movie, and the rest of Conrad’s story arc may be on the cutting room floor. The charm and charisma of the film come from Gemma Arterton’s Polly and Djimon Hounsou’s Shola. Beyond being Conrad’s nanny, Polly is a crack shot and the heart of an intricate network of domestic staff workers that can get all kinds of helpful information. Shola is a servant for the Oxford family and a bodyguard, fighting instructor, and loyal friend. If there is a joke to be made, it is coming from one of these two, and unfortunately, they are few and far between.

Ralph Fiennes stars as Orlando Oxford, Conrad’s father, a decorated soldier, and the eventual founder of the Kingsman. He is, in a word, fantastic. Without a stellar performance from Fiennes, this could be the death of the Kingsman franchise, even with a fourth and fifth film already announced. Fiennes gets to run the gauntlet of emotional acting, if you can think of an emotion, there is a chance he had a scene where it was highlighted. An average hurdler could clear the arc for Orlando, but that journey is studded with happiness, despair, anger, frustration, determination, and bewilderment. Fiennes excels in each moment and makes Orlando a rich and complex character. However, he and Vaughan both failed to make the character likable. Orlando is a very relatable character dealing with his own trauma and guilt. Unfortunately, he is joyless for 98% of the movie, and it weighs on the film.

What “The King’s Man” does better than anything else is creating a memorable team of villains based on real-life WWI players. The plot gets kicked into gear when the first member of the dark cabal, Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip (Joel Basman), assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand (Ron Cook). With his job done, it is up to the rest of the organization, including elite Dutch spy Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), Austrian mentalist Erik Jan Hanussen (Daniel Brühl), and Russia’s mad monk Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl) to sow the seeds of war. Each member of this formidable group of global criminals is dangerous on their own, but under the leadership of a shadowy puppet master from his secret mountain top lair, they will change the world. Everyone does a beautiful job in their roles, but Rhys Ifans is the clear standout. As written by Vaughn and Gajdusek, Rasputin may be too wild, too insane, too far from an accurate representation for Rhys to earn an Oscar nomination. However, I do not doubt that this is easily one of the year’s best performances.

Vaughn created a memorable entry into the Kingsman franchise with its ballet of violence and outrageous characters; it’s just not a remarkable one earning a 3 out of 5. “The King’s Man” will delight hardcore fans who can try and catch all the callbacks, but with a third of the film being excised, the final product feels disjointed. The worst film in the trilogy will be hotly debated, with “Kingsman: The Secret Service” being the only classic must-see entry in the series.

Rating: R
Genre: Action, Comedy, Adventure
Original Language: English
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Producer: Matthew Vaughn, David Reid, Adam Bohling
Writer: Matthew Vaughn, Karl Gajdusek
Release Date: December 22nd, 2021
Runtime: 2h 11m
Distributor: 20th Century Studios