THE KING’S MAN (2021) **

After thoroughly enjoying Kingsman:  The Golden Circle more than I expected, I decided to check out this prequel.  I’m not sure who asked for a Kingsman origin story set one hundred (!?) years before the first movie, but we got one anyway.  It’s certainly an odd duck.  It’s almost as if director Matthew Vaughn wanted to make a WWI movie and couldn’t get funding, so he just grafted the Kingsman brand onto it in order to get it made.  Whatever the case was, it just never really clicks.

Ralph Fiennes stars as a nobleman who masquerades as a pacifist, but is actually a covert secret agent keeping tabs on world governments.  As Europe enters The Great War, a similar agency working to cause global chaos further instigates and manipulates the countries.  Fiennes eventually says enough is enough and using intel developed by an intricate syndicate of domestic workers placed in the highest echelon of government, sets out to stop the war once and for all.  

The fun of the first two Kingsman movies was the fact that it was an amped-up, bawdy updating of the James Bond franchise.  Setting the prequel during WWI was a weird move.  The film doesn’t really tie into the others until the last scene and features little of what made those flicks so much fun.  Most of the time, it’s a dour and joyless slog punctuated by an occasional over the top fight scene.  These sequences, while they alleviate the boredom, aren’t nearly as wild or entertaining as the stuff we saw in the previous installments.  

I like Fiennes and all, but he’s just an ill fit as an action hero.  (Anyone who saw The Avengers can tell you that.)  The supporting players (Djimon Hounsou, Gemma Arterton, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, etc.) are well cast, and yet their roles are so flimsily written that they are unable to do very much with what they were given.  Only Rhys Ifans brings a spark to the proceedings as the mad monk, Rasputin.  His Russian ballerina moves during his big swordfight with Fiennes is the definite highlight, and hints at what could’ve been had the film possessed that same kind of energy throughout.  Sadly, once he vanishes from the proceedings, his presence is sorely missed, and the flick never quite recovers.  

I will say the film has one of the loopiest post-credits set-ups for a sequel I’ve ever seen.  It’s almost like a parody of your typical comic book post-credits sequence, but played with such deadly seriousness that it winds up getting the biggest laugh in the movie.  If only that same kind of bizarre energy was elsewhere in the flick, The King’s Man might’ve been a royal good time.