‘THE KING’S MAN’ ★★
With no Taron Egerton and few laughs, the third installment is charmless
It’s hard to quit the “Kingsman” series, though they’re seemingly trying to force us to.
That’s because the first film in 2015, “The Secret Service,” was a near perfect action-comedy that revitalized the spy spoof genre. Funny, suspenseful and sexy, it made a star out of Taron Egerton.
Then came the mediocre second entry, “The Golden Circle,” which grabbed hold of the humor and amped it up to a ludicrous level.
And now here’s a dreary prequel (aren’t they all?), “The King’s Man,” which is almost totally laugh-less, lacks a charismatic lead (Egerton’s character isn’t born yet) and is bogged down by the trench warfare misery of World War I.
Writer-director Matthew Vaughn, who’s helmed all three, needs to either call it quits or hand over the reins to someone with some selfcontrol. The formidable talent of Ralph Fiennes can lift his movie some, but the man’s not Hercules.
The prequel functions both as the story of how the fake organization was built and revisionist history about how WWI got started. The Duke of Oxford (Fiennes) and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) are even sitting in the Sarajevo carriage of Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he’s shot. Don’t remember that bit from history class!
The most amusing scene is with Rasputin, who Rhys Ifans interprets as magical, disgusting and creepy, and also a skilled dancer and swordsman. In an uncomfortable moment, he licks Oxford’s bullet wound to cure it. Weird, but the liveliest part of an otherwise funereal, overlong film.
Running time: 131 minutes. Rated R (sequences of strong/bloody violence, language and some sexual material). In theaters.