Idiotic pointless, witless prequel a royal mess
“The King’s Man” is not only a mess, but a mess in different ways. You can watch it for a full hour and still not have any idea where the story is heading, or what issues need to be resolved, or even what the point might be.
It’s a mess in terms of tone. Moments of silliness are followed by moments of tragedy that are intended to be moving. We know they’re moving because the soundtrack insists on it.
It’s also a mess historically. It’s set in the first decades of the 20th century and references real-life historical events, but in ways that are inaccurate, reductive and superficial. Most importantly, it’s done in a way that’s not funny, or illuminating, or any of the things that might justify a fast and loose approach to history.
“The King’s Man” is a prequel to the three previous “Kingsmen” movies, about a secret society of English spies operating out of a London tailor shop. No one was clamoring for such a prequel. No one was wondering, “Why a tailor shop? How did that happen?” But sometimes it’s those gifts we don’t expect that turn out to be the best.
Not this time, though. Ralph Fiennes plays the Duke of Oxford, who manages, in the movie’s first few minutes, to get his wife killed in the Boer War. He returns to London with his young son, where he soon uncovers that a diabolical cabal of evildoers is contriving to start a world war. It becomes Oxford’s mission to stop them.
Little problem: World War I happened, right? We already know that. So, we also know that Oxford will not succeed. Thus, the only possible element of suspense here is in our wondering exactly how the evil cabal will go about its plan.
But writer-director Matthew Vaughn doesn’t make that his focus. He focuses, rather, on
Oxford’s attempt to prevent a foregone conclusion.
Apparently, Gavrilo Princip, the guy who assassinated Franz Ferdinand (whose death precipitated the war) is in this evil cabal. So is Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), the mad-monk adviser to Czar Nicholas II, even though the real Rasputin was emphatically against Russian entry into the war.
The murder of Rasputin is depicted in “The King’s Man,” and, typical of the movie, the real murder — it took forever; he was harder to kill than Michael Myers in a “Halloween” movie — was a lot more dramatic and remarkable than what we see here.
The movie also ascribes America’s entry into World War I not to
the famous Zimmerman telegram (from Germany, encouraging Mexico to attack the United States), but to blackmail. Here, Oxford has access to a film of Woodrow Wilson getting a happyending lap dance in the Oval Office.
Now you don’t have to be a fan of President Wilson — who gave us the income tax, got us into a war after promising he wouldn’t,
suspended civil liberties, botched the peace, refused to resign when he was incapacitated by a stroke and was a racist even by 1915 standards. But the lap dance not only didn’t happen, but it has nothing to do with who Wilson was. One thing we know about Wilson at the time: He was a practically a newlywed and very into his wife.
So, “The King’s Man” is a mess, purposeless, pointless, witless. However, it’s not obnoxious. At times, it can even be close to enjoyable watching it squirm and try to make sense of itself. It has a genial idiocy and one genuinely effective sequence, involving mountain climbing. So, to its credit, it’s never actively annoying. It’s just, from start to finish, a disappointment.
Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. Rating: R (some sexual material, language, strong and bloody violence).