The King's Man (2021)

Matthew Vaughn knows he doesn’t need to keep making Kingsman movies, right? The original Kingsman film, The Secret Service, was a breath of fresh air (and a welcome bit of counterprogramming for those of us who didn’t want to see 50 Shades of Gray for Valentine’s Day 2015). The Golden Circle, however, was somewhat inert as a sequel, cringingly gross and overly enamored of itself. Fortunately, The King’s Man is a sight better than The Golden Circle, but it is dizzy and daft in a way that does it no favors.

The pacifist Orlando, Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), wants nothing more than to keep his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) out of the military, but the rising tides of the First World War conspire against them. Orlando and his servants (Gemma Arterton, Djimon Hounsou) form an ad hoc intelligence agency with Conrad to root out a conspiracy that includes the likes of Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), and Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl).

 

It’s worth remembering, after seven years and three films, that this all began as an adaptation of a 2012 comic book by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). I haven’t read the original comic in some years now, but my recollection was that it’s a fine soft send-up of the James Bond formula. However, as I was watching The King’s Man, I was thinking of another comic book I’d been reading earlier that day – Bill Willingham’s Fables, which imagines (in the tradition of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) what would happen if all the fairy tales were true, their characters all inhabiting the same universe. And this is exactly the conceit of The King’s Man; with so many larger-than-life historical figures running around between 1914 and 1918, what if they all knew each other? What if most of them were in an international ring of espionage together?

 

When it’s done with fictional characters, it opens up a new world of possibilities, but there’s something discomfiting when it’s a constellation of real historical figures. Perhaps it’s a failing of my own imagination, but I think it’s also true that The King’s Man mucks about with very recent history in transparent and unfulfilling ways. Ultimately, it’s a failing of the film not to do something interesting with this reckless historiography. (See instead, for example, Inglourious Basterds.) If I’m spending time trying to remember my college survey courses in history, the film isn’t working.

 

Apologies to Ralph Fiennes, who is plainly better than anything the screenplay gives him to do. He works the dialogue like a prestige World War I film, and he navigates the action sequences like something out of a Daniel Craig 007 flick. It’s when the film channels its Bond DNA that The King’s Man really sings, as in a third-act confrontation atop a mountainous plateau. The franchise seems to have jettisoned the gross-out laddish humor of The Golden Circle, and it’s for the best, yet the Bond-ier sequences remind the audience just how good The Secret Service was, and why. 

 

As the film wound down its James Bond denouement, I found myself wishing more of the film had been like that, more Spy Who Loved Me and not alternate history. As it stands, The King’s Man is very episodic, which works somewhat in its favor; if you’re not enjoying the plot, so the old saying might go, stick around for twenty minutes until it changes. But consequently the film’s big claim that it all matters because it’s all interconnected – right up to a big bad reveal that’s a bit obvious even if you don’t recognize a certain actor’s voice – falls flat when it doesn’t quite feel like a united whole. Instead, The King’s Man is a collection of bits, some better and some worse, that never exactly add up to something grander.

 

Then there’s the matter of the postcredits scene, which promises/threatens that the historical muckraking will continue, with a particular bygone villain who is so baldly obvious that it might better have been left to a satire of The King’s Man. Indeed, so outlandish is the moment when two prominent historical figures shake hands and conspire toward The King’s Man II that one can only assume from the deadly straight-faced presentation that the filmmakers know how patently silly it is. We can also hope that they know better. The King’s Man is fun but not fun enough, and I think it is high time that Matthew Vaughn move on to something else.

 

The King’s Man is rated R for “sequences of strong/bloody violence, language, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Matthew Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek. Based on the comics by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Harris Dickinson, and Djimon Hounsou.

Monday at the Movies - March 5, 2012

Welcome to Week Ten of “Monday at the Movies.” While I had never intended this series to be themed each week, it seems that it’s worked out that way so far. And so in that spirit, here are “Movies You Might Have to Watch in School!”

Persepolis (2007) – Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s much-loved graphic novel, Persepolis is the memoiristic story of Marji’s coming of age during the events of the Iranian Revolution. The film captures the tone of the original perfectly, blending hilarious humor with profoundly moving pathos, and the unique visual style of the comic is not lost in translation to motion. There are a few interpolations – several color sequences and a delightful scene in which Grandma and Marji go to the movies to see Godzilla – which enhance the visual experience. While I haven’t watched the French language original, I can vouch for the English language track, featuring (among others) Chiara Mastroianni as Marji, Sean Penn as her father, Gena Rowlands as the wise yet witty Grandma, and Iggy Pop as the brave and heroic Uncle Anoosh. While there are moments when Penn seems to be phoning it in, Rowlands and Iggy Pop are perfect choices, as is Amethyste Frezignac, who voices young Marji with just the right amount of joie de vivre. The story is deeply affecting, nuanced without reducing the story to an endorsement or rejection of the Revolution, and it hits the audience on several important emotional levels – humor, tragedy, sympathy, love. The film lost “Best Animated Feature” to Ratatouille, but in this case I’m not convinced that Pixar made the better film that year (as much as I love Ratatouille and the idea of a red-headed protagonist).

The Tempest (2010) – If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s Shakespeare at the movies, and this film had enough to lure my butt to a seat: director Julie Taymor at the helm (I loved Across the Universe and especially her other Shakespeare flick, Titus, with Anthony Hopkins), striking visuals, great source material, and an intriguing gender reversal with Helen Mirren as Prospera in place of old wizard Prospero. I love Titus and could watch it many times over, but I’m less impressed with The Tempest; it’s a perfectly adequate adaptation, but it seems to rely too much on the Prospera gimmick without doing anything inventive with the rest of the material – especially when it comes to the setting, which is lifeless and uninspiring. It’s a classic case of “nothing wrong” – even Russell Brand as one of the drunken clowns (with Alfred Molina) isn’t irritating or offensive. Perhaps worse, the film doesn’t weigh in at all on the Caliban controversy, arguably the current focal point of the play’s cultural significance. While I admit to being bored to tears with postcolonial readings of this play in particular (there seem to be other things going on, as well), the fact that Taymor almost ignores Caliban, especially when Djimon Hounsou is doing such fascinating work. But she handles the comic scenes well, with sufficient clowning in abundance, although the effect is that one wishes more for a “Stefano and Trinculo” sitcom than for the rest of this adaptation.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!