MOVIE REVIEW – The Kingsman series can be approached from many angles: in some ways it’s a poor man’s James Bond, in others it’s a laugh-out-loud (or often intended to be) super-spy spoof, so hilariously extreme, and in others it’s just plain silly or with scenes of no excitement. The King’s Man, set during the First World War and intended as an origin story, perhaps suffers even more from these stylistic mix-ups than its predecessors.

Ralph Fiennes himself has said that he almost replaced Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in The King’s Man in 1995, but that Brosnan ended up taking over the role – a decision Fiennes has no regrets about, because by his own admission he would have made a lousy Bond. Instead, he became the boss of M: James Bond in the latter two films and was excellent as the older, stake-necked MI6 big boss. It might seem an odd choice, then, that the 58-year-old actor should play the role of a James Bond-like British spy in the role of the founder of the Kingsman organisation. But that’s not the only oddity in King’s Man: The Beginning.

What should I call you?

It’s hard to say exactly what Matthew Vaughn was going for with this film, but that it’s “much more” than a mere origin story is undeniable – but unfortunately in a bad way. The film starts off with a groaning and melodramatic opening, in 1902, when Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) promises his dying wife Emily (Alexandra Maria Lara) that he will do everything he can to prevent world wars and keep his son from ever getting into a fight. But promises are promises, and Oxford sets up an international network of spies to prevent both the outbreak of World War I and his son Konrad (Harrid Dickinson) from getting involved in the fighting. We know from the history books that the first objective failed and, as stubborn and headstrong as Konrad is, Orland failed at the second.

So far, all this could be a simple film drama, which in itself would not fit the style of the first two Kingsmen at all, but the rest of the film is the usual extreme action and superhero movie parody – only partly with real-life historical characters. There is almost everything to do with the First World War: Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), the extroverted Russian ‘magician’ who licks the wound (yes, you read that right) on Oxford’s leg, shot 12 years earlier, to heal it, Mata Hara, who does an erotic dance for the US President to blackmail him, Gavrilo Princip, who plans his famous assassination, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who starts the great Soviet revolution by order from above. Yes, a higher order, because this ‘team’ is led by the Blofeld-like leader of a SPECTRE-like organisation.

A mix of styles

I think anyone who loves history will have their eyebrows raised, but as the majority of the film is more of a parody, it is impossible to take these characters or their age seriously for a single moment. That wouldn’t be a problem, the real problem is that the often silly or sometimes tasteless humour (such as the foot-licking) is hard to match with the otherwise rather dull and clichéd melodramatic scenes. This was less of a problem with the previous two Kingsman installments – although it has to be admitted that 2017’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle was so lousy that even this ill-fittingly styled World War I origin story is better than it.

There’s hardly any action until the first half of the film, and it’s only when the Oxford family and their men clash with Rasputin and the wayward Konrad enlists as a soldier against his father’s wishes that things really get going. The war scenes, by the way, are chokingly first-rate (and reminiscent of 1917), as are the later action scenes in which Ralph Fiennes proves how ‘cool’ (to use the film’s title) James Bond could be.

Too bad

It’s a shame that the first half of the film, which is at once gloomy, clichéd and boring, and the aforementioned jokes (which don’t go together, by the way), drag down The King’s Man for a long time. But it could have been a great World War I James Bond-like film, with some pretty punchy action sequences, if the filmmakers had been a little more focused on what they really wanted and the end result wasn’t so disjointed and chaotic.

-BadSector-