The King’s Man has a tagline that promises blood and an origin. “Witness the bloody origin,” the poster reads. What Matthew Vaughn actually delivers is a 131-minute history lesson with a body count and a bad case of the shakes.
The film is a prequel to Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) and Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017), the third instalment in the franchise. Ralph Fiennes plays Orlando Oxford, a British aristocrat who builds a private spy network and, eventually, the organisation the later films are named for. The cast around him is genuinely stacked: Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Harris Dickinson, Daniel Brühl, Djimon Hounsou and Charles Dance.
It does not work. The score is 4.4 of 10.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Orlando Oxford and the Promise in South Africa
The film opens in 1902, near the end of the Second Boer War. Orlando, his wife Emily, and their young son Conrad visit a British concentration camp in South Africa while working for the British Red Cross. A sniper attack mortally wounds Emily. Before she dies, she makes Orlando promise never to let their son see war again.
That promise is the engine of the whole picture, and Vaughn never trusts it. Twelve years later, Orlando has built a spy network staffed by his butler Shola (Hounsou) and his maid Polly Wilkins (Arterton). Conrad (Dickinson) wants to fight. Orlando forbids it and persuades Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener (Dance) to keep him out of the British Army.
So far, so sturdy. A father’s grief, a son’s ambition, a war creeping closer. Then the film starts throwing famous people at the screen.
Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip and a Bomb
At Kitchener’s request, Conrad and Orlando ride through Sarajevo with Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Conrad saves the Archduke from a bomb thrown by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb intent on sparking a war.
Princip later runs into the Archduke’s entourage by chance and fatally shoots him and his wife. World War I begins. Vaughn stages the most consequential assassination in modern history as a punchline about bad luck.
Witness the bloody origin.
The tagline is doing work the film will not. It promises a secret history with teeth. What it delivers is a Wikipedia timeline with a fight scene stapled to it.
The Flock, the Shepherd and Rasputin
Orlando learns the assassination was orchestrated by “The Flock,” a group plotting to pit the German, Russian and British empires against each other. The group is led by a mysterious figure called “Shepherd,” whose ultimate goal is Scottish independence. His operatives include Grigori Rasputin, trusted adviser to Tsar Nicholas of Russia.
Rhys Ifans plays Rasputin as a lurching, leering cartoon. He poisons Nicholas’s young son Alexei, then cures him after Nicholas promises to pull Russia out of the war. Conrad learns of the manipulation from his cousin, Prince Felix Yusupov.
Knowing the Western Front will be left vulnerable if Russia exits, Conrad takes the information to Kitchener and his aide-de-camp Major Max Morton (Goode). Kitchener sets sail for Russia.
Tom Hollander plays King George, Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas — three monarchs, one actor, a joke the film makes and then keeps making. It is the single best idea in The King’s Man and it is spent in minutes.
What the Cast Is Asked to Do
Fiennes is a serious actor in a film that does not deserve him. He plays Orlando with a stiff upper lip and a heavy heart, and the movie around him keeps interrupting with slapstick.
Arterton’s Polly is the most interesting figure on paper — a maid who is really a field agent — and the script gives her almost nothing. Hounsou’s Shola is a butler who kills people. That is the whole character.
Charles Dance’s Kitchener exists to be a name from a textbook. Daniel Brühl appears as Erik Jan Hanussen, a real historical figure the film has no idea what to do with. Aaron Taylor-Johnson shows up as Archie Reid, a soldier and founding Kingsman Lancelot, and Stanley Tucci appears as the US Ambassador to the UK and founding Kingsman Bedivere. Both are cameos dressed as roles.
The Origin Nobody Asked For
Here is the problem with a prequel to Kingsman. The 2014 film was a nasty, funny, mean-spirited lark about a chav kid learning to be a gentleman spy. It had a point of view. The King’s Man wants to explain where that organisation came from, and its answer is: a guilt-ridden duke, a dead wife, and World War I.
That is not an origin. That is a coincidence with a budget.
The film was originally scheduled for release by 20th Century Studios on 8 November 2019. It was delayed several times because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It finally opened in the United States on 22 December 2021, and in the United Kingdom four days later. Development had been confirmed back in June 2018, with Vaughn announcing plans for a prequel and a sequel shot back-to-back.
None of that delay shows as care. It shows as a film that was assembled and reassembled until the seams went soft.
The Biggest Problems, in Order
Ranking what actually sinks The King’s Man is not hard.
- The script. Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek never decide what the film is, so it is a tragedy, a caper and a history lesson at once, all at half strength.
- The tone. A concentration camp, a dead mother and a slapstick Rasputin do not belong in the same reel.
- The wasted cast. Fiennes, Arterton, Ifans, Hounsou and Dance are all better than the material.
- The franchise setup. Archie Reid and the US Ambassador exist to plant names, not to be people.
- The action. It is competent and forgettable, which for a Kingsman film is a failure.
The Verdict, and Why It Is 4.4
The King’s Man is not the worst film of 2021. It is the most confused. Matthew Margeson composed the score, replacing Henry Jackman. The music is fine. The action is fine. The cast is better than fine, which is exactly what makes the result so irritating.
The most telling detail is the promise Emily extracts from Orlando. A mother dies so her son will never see war. The film then spends two hours making sure he sees war. That is a real idea. Vaughn treats it as a plot mechanism.
The published critical score for The King’s Man is 4.4 of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 44 of 100. That is the right number. The film is not a disaster. It is a waste — of a cast, of a premise, and of the only interesting question the Kingsman franchise ever asked.
4.4 of 10.
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