THE KING’S MAN

Hold the Eggsy

Despite Kingsman: The Golden Circle dulling our appetite for more from Matthew Vaughn’s turbo-charged spy franchise, here we are again, with an almost totally undesired First World War-era prequel exploring the origins of the world’s best-tailored intelligence service.

Foolishly, The King’s Man eschews the Pygmalion-like set-up of the first two movies, plunging us headfirst into a film peopled almost entirely by the super rich and powerful, without an Eggsy to ease us in.

“It’s important,” our lead character Conrad, son of the Duke of Oxford, is told, “that people born into privilege lead by example.” And that’s what the movie is: a two-hour-plus defence of that most maligned of modernday minorities, the British upper class, by the multi-millionaire husband of Claudia Schiffer. Though it aims for a more sincere tone than the other films, it’s hard to take any of the emotion seriously when, in the previous entry, we saw a camera swoop into Poppy Delevingne’s vagina.

Extras “The King’s Man: The Great Game Begins” is a six-part doc. “A Generation Lost” (11 minutes) features Vaughn explaining how and why the film came into being, while “Oxfords and Rogues” (18 minutes) focuses on the casting. “All The World’s A Stage” (26 minutes) looks at effects, cinematography, costumes, set design and so on, while “Instruments Of War” (17 minutes) zeroes in on the action.

“Fortune Favours The Bold” (11 minutes) spotlights the music, and “Long Live The Kingsmen” is four minutes of general hype talk. Elsewhere, “No Man’s Land” (15 minutes) goes behind the curtain of one of the most brutal scenes, while “Remembrance And Finding Purpose” (26 minutes) is a worthy, if somewhat incongruous, feature on the work done by the Royal British Legion.

The signature – and savage – battle scene set in No Man’s Land was actually filmed in a West London car park.