So many fun moments are to be had in The King’s Man, but the story simply cannot connect them into a cohesive story that is worth the journey.
Did you ever want a movie to succeed so badly that, regardless of the theatrical reviews, you were certain everyone was wrong about so that you would enjoy it? Welcome to The King’s Man, where a beautiful concept on a prequel gets caught up in its own tangled mess, but still has fun moments.
Let’s get right into it.
Official Synopsis
Set during WWI, The King’s Man tells the exhilarating origin story of Kingsman, the world’s very first independent intelligence agency. As a collection of history’s worst tyrants and criminal masterminds gather to plot a war to wipe out millions across the globe, one man must race against time to stop them.
Let me just add before we get too far down the rabbit hole, that I loved the first film, enjoyed the second, and had a lot of hope for the third. This was supposed to be the Battlefield I for the Kingman’s series, where everything is simplified and historically justified. When you use an actual war with actual political figures to drive your fun narrative, you just see that the sky could be the limit. You hope for the best and wish for the best. And ohhhhhhh…what could have been.
Vaughn’s idea to roll back the story to a simplified, less gadgety age was a wise move. It certainly added some creative elbow room to justify pretty much anything that he could come up with in the story. The King’s Man was beautifully placed in a timeline that would work well with the other two movies. Hell, it could have spawned about three more films to fully connect with them. Sadly, the story just simply didn’t know what it wanted to do. It was all excited to mix famous historical figures and moments into the mix that it didn’t fully appreciate and comprehend where to go and how to lock them together. What you get out of this film is disconnected series of unbelievably fun moments that have little or no solid connection with each other. Can you read the disappointment in my text? So much.
As act one begins, we’re introduced to the family that leads the film, the Oxfords. Ralph Fiennes plays Orlando Oxford, who is a cunning military op that gets his wife accidentally killed during a sniper attack on a British outpost. His son Conrad, played by Harris Dickinson, is forever scarred by witnessing his mom’s death. This moment sets the tone for the rest of the film, where Fiennes’ Orlando is trying to move on and make a peaceful life for him and his son Conrad. Regretfully, Conrad’s need to stop violence by using violence, due to his mom’s death, goes against his father’s plans. Not wanting his son to get hurt, Orlando takes his son on missions from the Crown, so that he can both keep an eye on Conrad and keep him out of harm’s way. Also, Orlando is trying to prevent World War I from happening. Spoiler, he doesn’t.
Anyway, the film jumps around political narrative shifts, where Orlando is called upon to take out Rasputin, who is a war crazy, batshit lunatic, in hopes of preventing an accelerated timeline to WWI. Orlando is also called upon to get the U.S. government to help with the impending war, which involves him hunting down and eliminating a blackmailing operative that has some risky-business footage of the U.S. President getting it on. The blackmail is keeping the U.S. from moving forward. The story then shifts to a more emotional and underlying reiteration of Orlando’s disdain for war through his son’s choice to join the war efforts when the British go to the frontlines to fight in WWI. *SPOILER ALERT* Ultimately, his son tragically dies after a heroic effort to save a spy *SPOILER ENDS* There is a lot of jumping around and imbalance to the storytelling, while each moment is magnified, but lost in its own confusion on what it should be connecting to at the end of each sequence. All the moments are great, they just have a hard time forming a single whole.
While the latter part of that paragraph is tragic and impactful, you really do feel bad for Orlando, the entire film is just made up of moments that simply do not connect well with each other. All the above are fine moments, which have their place in the three-act narrative structure presented by Vaughn, but none of them make sense when it comes to story beats and connecting plot points. It just seems like Vaughn was confused on how he wanted to create this movie and by the time he might have worked it out, it simply didn’t make sense. Considering Vaughn’s storytelling skills across his movie resume, maybe the pandemic put the ka-bosh on being able to finish the film properly. Vaughn can tell a story and his history with the Kingsman series proves that, but this oddly serious and out of sync film goes against those past efforts. That’s not to say that you won’t be entertained by the repulsiveness and vicious nature of a Rhys Ifans’ Rasputin, but you won’t fully get to see how that moment truly makes sense in the whole of the story because it doesn’t do a good job of bringing these moments together into one cohesive storyline.
By the time you reach the final moment, where you get to see Orlando and crew wrecking the hidden villain and thus revealing what ‘really’ has been going on, you simply want the movie to wrap it up. That final sequence in the third act is absolutely a blast, but because of the disconnected story pieces along the way, it’s hard to appreciate the whole.
I really wanted this movie to work. It deserved it, especially after the long wait to release it. It had all the right characters, all the right actors, even the right emotions at the right time, but it simply could not bring it together. That said, I do hope that Vaughn gets another non-pandemic shot of making another Kingsman film. The film series is fun and I think it deserves a better finale.
Conclusion
So many fun moments are to be had in The King’s Man, but the story simply cannot connect them into a cohesive story that is worth the journey.
