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.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

Though my original review was perhaps a little more even-tempered than I initially recalled, I look back on Kingsman: The Secret Service with great fondness, cringing at some of the bawdier moments but overall greatly sympathizing with director Matthew Vaughn’s appreciation for the 1960s era of spy films (particularly James Bond, though – as the characters are fond of reminding you – “dis ain’t dat kinda film, bruv”). While its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, is an enthusiastic action film with more than a few decent thrills, I was not transported in the way I was with the first film; that is, if the original were Skyfall, The Golden Circle is more Spectre, a sequel that doesn’t misstep but doesn’t transcend like its predecessor did.

After a coordinated attack on Kingsman, secret agent Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and gadget guy Merlin (Mark Strong) link up with their “American cousins” (Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, and Pedro Pascal) at Statesman to avenge their fallen comrades. As the trailers have revealed, however, a comrade also rises – Harry Hart (Colin Firth) returns to the service for the fight against the cartel leader Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), who controls the worldwide drug trade from her 1950s-infused lair.

As I was watching The Golden Circle, I couldn’t help but think of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a sequel to a similarly inventive and strong first outing. Though the two sequels do have a similar “more of the same” quality to them, never triumphing as their predecessors might have led one to expect, I can safely say that Golden Circle is unlike A Dame in that it’s not boring. Where A Dame felt almost sleepily safe and content merely to reproduce what had gone before, Golden Circle shakes up the script and goes to places one wouldn’t expect. Though slickly devised, Harry’s return is anything but smooth, and it leads to an interesting new dynamic with Eggsy. It’s a real treat also to see a British stereotype of Americans; if The Secret Service satirized Britain’s vision of itself, Golden Circle is a dashing wink of a cliché of the United States, with its cowboy whiskey peddlers and honky-tonk bars.

The Golden Circle is not, as the trailers might have led you to believe, a film about the Statesman agents (though apparently Vaughn wants to make that spinoff). Aside from Pascal, who participates in the film’s rousingly thrilling Spy Who Loved Me by way of OHMSS action setpiece, the Statesman cast amounts to an extended cameo. The focus is squarely – rightly, as fun watching Statesman can be – on the Kingsman agents and the high-octane action that follows them. The film opens with an extensive (and, in IMAX, quite loud) taxi chase through London; you’ve also got the ski chase sequence, a snowy shootout, and the raid on Poppy’s HQ, all of which feel substantively different than what we saw in the first Kingsman film.

This Kingsman is about twenty minutes longer than the first one, and I have to say it does feel it. There’s a recurring gag about Elton John that overstays its welcome, and this film does feel a bit bogged down by laddish humor, perhaps more so than before (but mercifully not as bad as in Kick-Ass 2, which actively suffered from this). The first Kingsman famously ends (no spoilers) with an unconventional send-up of Bond’s get-the-girl closer, and while it’s tonally off-putting it wasn’t as cringingly gross as Eggsy’s encounter at the Glastonbury Music Festival, which does leave a bad taste on the film for a while. Perhaps overall the film needs more of what Colin Firth brought to the first film and to Eggsy’s training – a Pygmalion for the surveillance crowd, polishing up the rough bits and reminding us to stand a little straighter. (Put another way, “Manners maketh man.”)

Back in 2015, Kingsman: The Secret Service was better than most of us were expecting it to be, especially since it was pitted (you’ll recall) against the guaranteed box-office winner 50 Shades of Gray. The Golden Circle, however, is not as good as it should have been, though neither is it as bad as it could have been. It’s not as impressive as the first, which is a tragedy, but it’s a fine second entry and a cheering diversion at its best.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, drug content, language throughout, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. Based on the comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, and Julianne Moore.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

I’m really quite surprised that the marketing for Kingsman: The Secret Service didn’t make more of the fact that its central antagonist is named Richmond Valentine, a tycoon with a sinister plot set to culminate on the self-styled “Valentine’s Day.”  It is, I suspect, infinitely more preferable than the other film opening this weekend, 50 Shades of Grey; though vastly more violent and surprisingly more chaste, Kingsman ends up being at once a highly palatable deconstruction and a heroically rousing genuine article.

Repaying the debt he owes the boy’s father, secret agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) springs local hoodlum Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton) from lockup and recruits him to be a member of Kingsman, an elite espionage unit in the heart of Britain.  While Eggsy trains to earn a seat at the table, Hart (codename: Galahad) tracks the malicious misdeeds of Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), a blue-chip billionaire with dastardly designs on the planet’s future.

As with Kick-Ass, the previous collaboration between director Matthew Vaughn and comics writer Mark Millar, Kingsman: The Secret Service bears a curious relationship with the eponymous comic book by Millar and Dave Gibbons.  The film is very loosely based on the comic, in  the way that I think all of Millar’s work ought to be; Vaughn has taken the broadest strokes from the source material and done his own riff unfettered by fidelity.  Millar’s work always has a darkly cynical edge to it, refusing to pander to the reader’s expectations and instead shocking him with truly grotesque violence and profanity.  As before, Vaughn’s adaptation is more earnest, more interested in deconstructing and rebuilding a film genre than in disparaging convention.

A point-by-point comparison would be somewhat facile (EW’s done a “top five” if you’re interested – beware spoilers in the comments), but case in point – the book unfolds the mystery of who’s been abducting science-fiction icons.  Sidebar for a fun fact: the book opens with the abduction of Mark Hamill; the film opens with the kidnapping of a climate change scientist played by Hamill.  The film, however, tells us fairly early on that Valentine is the villain, and where the book derided Valentine for being a simpering nerd, Sam Jackson’s antagonist is steeped in deliberate camp because he’s a self-conscious throwback to the James Bond villains of old.

As someone who spent the last two years tearing through the James Bond film franchise, seeing Kingsman’s loving critique of the gentleman spy brought a warmth to my heart, one that overrode my occasional frustration with the film’s more excessive laddish humor (cranked up more than in any of Vaughn’s other work, alas).  The film gives us a very suave Bond-esque figure, promptly dispenses with him, and then gives us something even better in the form of Harry Hart, the role that Colin Firth seems to have been waiting to play.  His entire performance exudes a sense of, “Look, I’ve won the Oscar for playing royalty, thanks very much.  But what I’d really like to do is be James Bond.”  He came close with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (with his costar Mark Strong turning up here as Merlin, the Kingsman agency’s tech guru).  But Kingsman is Firth’s moment to shine, and boy, is he dapper as ever.  Jackson brings plenty of charisma as the villain, though honestly he’s just playing himself with a lisp (“Do I look like I give a ----?” could be either Valentine’s quip or Jackson’s response to a dull interview); Firth, on the other hand, is all class, the kind of man that every male moviegoer ought to want to be.

Throughout it all, though, Vaughn never fails to keep it fun, never sacrificing entertainment value for self-consciousness.  In part, this is because the characters are themselves reveling in the act of nostalgia, fondly recalling the quirks and clichés of James Bond and his similarly initialed comrades (Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, et al).  But the greater strength is that Vaughn doesn’t lean too heavily on genre, instead giving us resplendently engaging action sequences for which the allusions to monologuing villains and underground lairs are mere (but in the latter case, literal) set decoration.

As I’ve said before, the film does overstep itself every once in a while; there are a few references to real-life figures, the Westboro Baptist Church and Barack Obama among them (though Vaughn is nonsensically backpedaling on the latter), where the satirical eye becomes downright mean.  The “Pomp and Circumstance” sequence, however – which some reviewers have, tsk tsk, spoiled in their write-ups – is perhaps the most lewdly absurd of these tonal digressions, and in these moments it seems Vaughn allows the reins to slip.  Millar’s pointed disdain works amid the overall attitude of his work, but in the film adaptations, Vaughn is at his best when he’s working in a sandbox populated by wry witticisms and gentle self-reflexivity.

At two points in the film, one character cites a spy genre chestnut, only to be met with the response, “This isn’t that kind of movie.”  Honestly, I’m very much okay with that.  This is the kind of film I felt was promised at the end of Skyfall.  The moment when Bond enters the new M’s office – only it’s the same office from Dr. No – felt like an emphatic “And we’re back, only better.”  Kingsman is that next step, celebrating the best of the genre while moving in a decidedly modern direction.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much excited for Spectre (the next Bond film), but a Kingsman 2 would get my ticket dollar just the same.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, language and some sexual content.”  The violence is comprised of several very bloody fight sequences, some providing very unflinching detail with some creative methods of killing; gunshots, knives, slicing metallic limbs, and hand-to-hand combat is all included.  The F-word abounds, in excess of 100 times, and one reference to an unusual sexual act is delivered for comedic effect.