The King's Man

Mannered Maketh Malarkey (Dulce et decorum est cogitare hanc pelliculam sugit)

or

The Prequel To End All Prequels

 

I wasn't a fan of Kingsman: The Secret Service, although I enjoyed most of the performances, particularly Taron Egerton's, I felt that it was pretty sloppy without much holding it together, although the satire was there and recognizable as such. It was meant to be a breezy jocular look at spy thrillers,  located somewhere in between the Bond Series and Austin Powers, hewing closer to the latter in terms of cleverness (or lack of it) and amping up the violence to the point that—despite containing the adage that "manners maketh man"—it became decidedly unmannerly.

 

One couldn't take it seriously and so any connection to a thriller goes right down the chute as the stakes are as high as they are in a "Looney Toons" cartoon. Samuel L. Jackson had it right in the first one by playing the arch-villain with a silly lisp, which has become his signature tic for showing he has no respect for the material he's playing—he certainly doesn't use it when hawking Capital One.

So outlandish actions and jolly good manners was the joke of the first two films, but director Matthew Vaughn's latest, The King's Man—boasting original material from Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek (good villain name, that)—goes back in time to show the origins of the secretive Kingsman organization that bypasses political discussion and goes right for the jugular. Why this was thought necessary is anyone's guess, but I suspect—with another movie featuring Egerton in the works at the same time—they may be offering material that will relate to the next sequel. There are a couple of prominent names in cameo's and perhaps they'll be part of the next one.

The film concerns the exploits of Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes and bloody good, if seeming like he's in the wrong movie), the Duke of Oxford, who, at the time of the film's opening is a former war officer now working for the Red Cross and inspecting a concentration camp in South Africa in 1902. He is there to see General Herbert Kitchener (Charles Dance) about the deplorable conditions and talk strategy. In the course of the visit, the party comes under attack and Oxford's wife Emily (who encouraged Oxford's humanitarian duties) is killed before the eyes of Oxford—who has been wounded in the attack—and their young son Conrad. With her dying breath, Emily swears Oxford to "protect our son, protect him from this world, and never let him see war again."

When Conrad grows to the age of 17 (and embodied by Harris Dickinson) is looking for a life of adventure, which his father vehemently opposes. He wants to join the Army when of age, but Oxford keeps him at home under the watchful eyes of associates Shola (Djimon Hounsou) and Polly (Gemma Arterton), who are crack spies and soldiers of fortune, but hide in plain sight as part of the Duke's staff. Presumably, it was so hard to hire good marksmen in that day. Oxford has good reason to be worried. Somewhere on an improbably high, flat and unscalable escarpment a group of terrible people are plotting to destroy the world and make money doing it. Headed by a Scottish separatist code-named The Shepherd, the group contains as members from around the globe including Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl) and Gavrilo Princip (Joel Basman). 

Oh, and Erik Jan Hanussen (Daniel Brühl).

Who? Well, I'll bet most audience-members don't know who Rasputin is, so don't feel bad. And I'm sure that a lot of them don't know the significance of Arch-Duke Ferdinand (played in the film—briefly, which is historically accurate, by Ron Cook).

Hell, ask the common man about World War I and you'll get a response like "World War II had a prequel?" or "Yeah, Wonder Woman was in it" Be that as it may, the group is trying to exacerbate the already bad relationship between three head-strong cousins, King George V (of England), Kaiser Wilhelm II (of Germany), and Tsar Nicholas II (of Russia), all played amusingly by Tom Hollander (bravo, sir!),* starting with the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand, and the poisoning of Nicholas' son Alexei.

In his attempts to protect his son Oxford nearly gets him killed protecting the Arch-Duke and taking out Rasputin. But, then, this film has a habit of having people saying things and doing something that is contrary to their words. Oxford makes grand speeches about colonialism and imperialism and the exploitation of the indigenous people, but his comfort in his class and power has him being a very good example of all that. The only folks who seem to actually mean what they say are the villains, who are all so single-mindedly evil that they barely register as real characters—these were all very powerful and influential people and they're treated like puppets in this film's Grand Scheme.

But, at least they're consistent. The movie, on the other hand, careers between goofiness and sanctimony. Words are meant to be taken seriously, but the action sequences not so—deft (and unbelievable) as they are. Rasputin, Oxford, Conrad and Shola have a three-to-one duel set to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, there's a weirdly impractical assault on that villain lair, and there's a World War I trench assault that, as completely unbelievable as it is, is still meant to be taken seriously if we're to have any feelings for the character.

It's a film of duplicity and two-facedness, delighting in "hilt-cams" and elaborate torpedo shots and a flash-zip of two years of World War I to see the the reduction of a hamlet town into a No Man's Land. Jeez, there's even an mustache to mustache edit in the thing. One starts to think that the film-makers are just so pleased with themselves and their own cleverness that they can do such little miracles that they don't see that the movie is clumsy and ham-fisted. So ham-fisted that the "surprise reveal" of "The Shepherd" is easily guessed just by the way shots are held unnecessarily before cutting away from them. Clever.
  

So clever it's stupid.

 

* Yes, it's true. Those heads of state were all related to each other (and you thought the Daniel Craig Bond movies were too in-bred!) No wonder the 20th century was so fucked up. And no wonder people wanted to do away with the Right of King's.