The King's Man (2021)

Score: 3.5 / 5

This series is so very strange. Back when The Secret Service launched in 2014, it seemed that Matthew Vaughn just wanted to make a silly, vulgar James Bond movie for a new age. And that's fine, just like the first two films. Wild and wacky, they stop just shy of full camp due to the earnestness with which they lean into their action sequences (not to say that Elton John flirting with Colin Firth after kicking ass in a parrot costume in The Golden Circle isn't camp). Overplotted and overwritten, they toy with larger ideas to validate their often cringey comedy moments, which makes for solid entertainment if not always anything more. And you can hardly fault the series for its considerable body count, which often includes main cast members.

The King's Man, the prequel origin story of the Kingsmen organization, is much more tame than the two that came before. Perhaps this is due to its setting, on the brink of war in 1914, when much of the smash-bang, gadget-driven action of the modern installments by definition can't happen. This one is much more of a spy movie, concerned with actual historical characters and events and the political games that led to open war. 

Ralph Fiennes (who finally proves his mettle at the kind of Bond character he could have played so well) plays the protagonist, Orlando Oxford, a VC-decorated former army officer and now sworn pacifist. Having lost his wife in the Boer War, Oxford has become more reclusive, determined to protect his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) at all costs. Covertly, he has recruited two of his household servants (the excellently cast Djimon Hounsou and Gemma Arterton) to help him start his own spy network, hoping to head off unnecessary conflicts before they erupt. Oxford mentions more than once that they are able to hide in plain sight as servants ignored by the privileged. He, however, is an important advisor to King George (Tom Hollander, who deliciously also plays Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas) in the time leading up to the Great War, and so hiding is not an option for him.

After setting itself up as a measured commentary on colonialism and pacifism, the film does inevitably turn toward violence, and it's not as classy as one might have hoped. A primary delight in the first film was seeing Colin Firth's character go from dapper gentleman to bloodthirsty maniac. Here, Fiennes is more restrained, which is great, but the film itself is about as bonkers as ever. To try and prevent Russia from leaving the war and opening the Western Front, the team journeys to Russia to stop Rasputin (an almost unrecognizable Rhys Ifans). The mad monk is working for the mysterious Shepherd (a sort of Moriarty or Blofeld figure), who is orchestrating the world war. Oxford's confrontation of Rasputin is an amazing sequence that blends actual history with bizarre action fantasy -- and a particularly uncomfortable scene in which Rasputin heals Oxford's leg wound by licking it -- and is a highlight of the film.

I found myself wondering more than once if this was initially conceived as a standalone WWI film before Vaughn co-opted or pirated it and then shoehorned it into his burgeoning and unlikely franchise. Some of the spy stuff and most of the war stuff is really solid filmmaking, with another excellent sequence taking place in a no-man's land hellish field of mud and blood; it reminded me of Wonder Woman and 1917 perhaps more than it deserved. But because of its greater emotional intelligence and slightly more accessible tone, The King's Man might be my favorite of this franchise yet.