Kingsmen is a movie franchise entirely built around the amusing contradiction of unassuming posh and polite British folks being extremely capable and violent spies. And yet that gimmick did work very well for a single film in 2015 -largely off of its’ inventive action scenes and its’ characterization, launching the career of Taron Egerton. But by the sequel in 2017, that steam was already starting to run out, and by 2021 there’s very little left that can be offered. Matthew Vaughn however seems to really care about this franchise, investing so much in a prequel that nobody asked for.
Obviously COVID didn’t help The King’s Man at all, delaying the film longer than just about any originally scheduled to drop in 2020. I’ve been seeing the trailer for it at the cinema for almost two years now, it’s been exhausting and by this past summer I was convinced it was never going to drop. Of course since its’ production, Twentieth Century Studios fell into the hands of Disney, and these last few weeks they’ve just been dumping everything they inherited from that deal (West Side Story, Nightmare Alley and now this) into the holiday season against their big titan in the knowledge they’ll be drowned out by it. It’s deplorable, but The King’s Man is really the only one of them that kind of deserves such a write-off status.
In a way, I do pity Vaughn when it comes to this movie. He cares a great deal about continuing this world and he clearly made choices with this film designed to broaden its’ scope and appeal. He’s changed the setting and tone, played down the comedy and even the action in favour of sincerer, dramatic storytelling, put a woman and a black man at the forefront of the founding of this organization, and with that attempts to rehabilitate it somewhat from its’ antiquated, classist, neo-colonialist connotations -to the point Ralph Fiennes’ Orlando, Duke of Oxford, it’s principal character, has to explicitly state he is anti-colonialism (even while keeping an African butler).
But in doing this, Vaughn only unwittingly highlights why the series has no place continuing. It’s evolutions come without any real desire, changing little about the overall aesthetic of the Kingsmen, and if anything only leaving it more dry. The plot is set over the First World War, though liberties are taken with the history so as to more directly involve the early Kingsmen and their enemies in a major capacity. The result though is an overly simplistic, even offensive example of anti-history. In this universe the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the First World War itself, the Russian Revolution, and the Zimmerman Telegraph were all orchestrated and manipulated by a singular evil cabal –Gavrilo Princip, Vladimir Lenin, and most notably Rasputin all mere agents of an organization led by a disgruntled Scotsman setting this all into motion just to destroy the English (seemingly unaware that at this point in history any harm done to the English is harm also done to the Scots because… the United Kingdom). It’s very dumb, but the movie still takes seriously the severity and cost of the war, as though its’ shallow new origins mean something. There is a long sequence in the movie focused entirely on Orlando’s son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) on the Western Front that is trying to capture the misery and trauma of that environment authentically, as though it were suddenly My Boy Jack; but at the same time the context is built out of a trivializing of history –and further, Vaughn just isn’t capable of the necessary earnestness.
He doesn’t know what to do with important character beats or moments of thematic integrity. Conrad determines to save an injured man left in No Man’s Land for example, a culminating demonstration of his desire to help people, only for the dramatic act of this to be cut short when the two are blasted by a shell, almost comically edited, and the guy dies anyway. It’s similar to a scene early in the film depicting the death of Orlando’s wife in South Africa. Fiennes manages to pull through some sense of feeling in moments, particularly grief, but that’s only because of how good an actor he is. The film does nothing on its’ own to earn them.
And this does not make for a good mix with the toning down of the action and humour, elements that were among the most well-received of the prior movies. The King’s Man has just two major action set-pieces, from which that overplayed trailer has drawn heavily from: a skirmish in Saint Petersburg with Rhys Ifans’ eccentric caricature of Rasputin (depicted as a lascivious, animalistic figure with superhuman fighting abilities), and a drawn-out climactic fight on a mountain in the Scottish Highlands with the mysterious villain and his minions. There is some creativity in these sequences, one or two thrills, but the energy has no real freshness to it, the pacing and editing isn’t versatile, as much as Vaughn is more clearly in his comfort zone of choreography.
Ralph Fiennes isn’t really a fit for action scenes either, hence why in the Bond franchise he’s 007’s boss and not 007 himself. He elevates the material around these moments a touch, but is never terribly believable in combat. Djimon Hounsou however is better served by this film in both action and character than he has been in a good while –though his characters’ relationship to Orlando still comes across somewhat tone-deaf. Harris Dickinson I believe Vaughn was hoping would be the next Taron Egerton, but unfortunately Dickinson doesn’t have nearly the charisma –also it’s an uphill battle for this franchise to try to endear the audience to two highly wealthy and privileged protagonists. The cast also includes Gemma Arterton, Daniel Brühl, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander (as George, Wilhelm, AND Nicholas), and Charles Dance; as well as featuring cameos from Stanley Tucci, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alison Steadman, and weirdly both leads of Terence Malick’s A Hidden Life, August Diehl and Valerie Pachner.
It’s a lot of impressive names for a wholly unimpressive movie, not much worth the long wait it took to come. The King’s Man has some fun potential in it, but Vaughn is either incapable of bringing it to the forefront or chose not to for misguided reasons bent on keeping alive the series he’s spent the last decade devoted to. It may have been better, but I doubt any version could have saved this bizarre film franchise, going out with a whimper alongside 2021. I suppose in that sense, it is fitting.
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