‘The King’s Man’: A Bloated Prequel That Squanders a Good Idea

“The King’s Man” is the prequel that never needed to exist. Set in the early 20th century, it tries to establish the origins of the secret agent organization known as the Kingsman. Instead, it becomes a bloated, overlong mess that wastes a strong premise on a script that can’t stop talking. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, who also co-wrote the screenplay, the film drags its runtime through a series of set pieces that feel less like action and more like a parade of bad ideas.

The film opens with a war in the Congo, where a German aristocrat named Black Tom (Rhys Ifans) is experimenting with a deadly gas. His goal is to reshape the world by wiping out the poor and weak. Across Europe, a young Duke (Harris Dickinson) is about to inherit his family’s fortune and title. He meets a man named Merrick (Charles Dance), who offers him a vision of a better future: an organization of agents who protect the world from threats like Black Tom.

Black Tom is the villain of the piece, and he’s meant to be terrifying. Ifans plays him with a sneer and a sense of entitlement, but the character never feels fully realized. His plan is simple: release the gas and let nature take its course. The film spends far too long explaining it, and the payoff is a sequence that looks like a disaster movie made by people who don’t understand disasters.

Merrick is the founder of the Kingsman, and Dance sells the role with a quiet intensity. He sees the Duke as a potential leader, a man who could bring the organization into being. The problem is that the film doesn’t know what to do with this idea. It keeps cutting away from the central plot to follow side characters, and the result is a story that loses its focus.

Dickinson plays the Duke as a young man caught between duty and desire. He wants to serve, but he also wants to live. The film tries to build a bond between him and Merrick, but it keeps undercutting that connection by splitting the story across multiple threads. The Duke’s arc should be the heart of the film. Instead, it gets buried under a pile of explosions and speeches.

The film adds several side stories involving other agents, each of which drains energy from the main plot. One follows a woman named Greta (Gemma Chan) who runs a nightclub in Berlin. Another follows a young man named Conrad (Tom Hopper) who is recruited from a boxing gym. These characters are meant to flesh out the world, but they mostly just slow things down.

Here’s how the film’s major events unfold:

There are moments where “The King’s Man” shows flashes of its potential. The action sequences are ambitious, even if they’re often poorly staged. The cast is game, and there are a few jokes that land. But these moments are rare, and they’re quickly overwhelmed by the film’s excesses.

The film’s biggest problem is its pacing. It runs far longer than it should, and it never finds a rhythm. The dialogue is often clunky, with characters saying things that sound like exposition dressed up as conversation. The humor is hit-or-miss, and the attempts at satire fall flat.

Here’s how the film’s major threads rank by impact, from strongest to weakest:

1. Merrick’s vision for the Kingsman
2. The Duke’s transformation
3. Black Tom’s gas plot
4. The side stories involving Greta and Conrad

On Metacritic, “The King’s Man” holds a critic score of 4.4 out of 10. That number feels generous. The film is a mess, and it’s hard to recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen the original trilogy. For fans of the franchise, this might be a curiosity. For everyone else, it’s a waste of time.

“The King’s Man” fails to capture the spirit of the Kingsman films that came before it. It’s a bloated, unfocused prequel that squanders a good idea on a bad execution. The cast is talented, the concept is promising, and the final score is a 4.4 out of 10.

Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.

Kingsman · Matthew Vaughn · movie review · prequel · The King's Man