The King’s Man Movie Review: Kingsman: The Secret Service when it came out gave us a neat slice of how we can take action films forward. Having a goofy sense of tone with it mixed in with some genuinely good action and spy elements, the movie was a blast from start to finish. Then comes Kingsman: The Golden Circle and it does everything the first film did, but loses all of its charm because it overdoes everything. With The King’s Man, we go back in time to discover the origin of this organisation, and we end up with a film that’s just a bigger mess. The King’s Man Gets a New Release Date in India; Matthew Vaughn’s Spy Drama to Now Hit the Screens on January 14, 2022!

The King’s Man focuses on the origin of the Kingsman organisation and is a prequel. Taking place during World War I, it focuses on a conspiracy taking place among a network of agents, at the top of which is a mysterious Scottish Shepherd. Well that’s the gist of the plot, fairly straightforward right? Nope, not even a bit.

Well I just want to get some positives out of the way. Rhys Ifans as Rasputin was the best part about the film. Without the first act it would have been a dull affair and wouldn’t have been as exciting. He transformed for this role and got a great sense of wackiness to the movie that fits right within director Matthew Vaughn’s style. So to my absolute no surprise, of course he has one of the shortest roles in the film.

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The plot revolving around Rasputin was great, and the moment that got resolved, the film takes a headfirst dive into a free fall. Firstly it’s a spy film while also trying to give a message about why war is bad. Ralph Fiennes as Orlando is a great character who is trying to keep his son out of the war. That alone makes for a conflict that could have added great character dynamics, but the way that entire sequence is explored is so messy.

At one point The King’s Man is trying to be Matthew Vaughn comic book film, on the other it’s trying to be a 1917 like film with its no man’s land sequences. The middle portion of this film loses all the sensibilities of what makes a coherent film. It just resorts to looking cool without any substance attached to it.

Do the fight scenes look cool? Of course, Matthew Vaughn is great at directing them. As a matter of fact they are even improved over here in a big way from Kingsman: The Golden Circle where it felt more shaky cam like. But does all that cool looking action even matter if the structure of the plot is a mess?

That’s not even to mention the third act. There is surely some enjoyable stuff here, but again it just comes out of nowhere and is not explored well. Vaughn puts our characters in some big dangerous situation, but I just didn’t care about them. It all culminated in a villain twist that I saw coming from a mile away, and that the more I thought about it the more sense it didn’t make. The King’s Man Special Look Teaser: Ralph Fiennes, Matthew Goode Lead Intriguing Origin Story of the Secret Service Agency (Watch Video).

Matthew Vaughn definitely is great at adapting comic book properties. We have seen him do that with Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class and the first Kingsman film, but he needs to understand that it’s not all about trying to look cool while consistently complicating your plot. I really wanted to like The King’s Man, but sadly it was just something that I got extremely bored watching until the next action set piece hit.

Yay!

Rhys Ifans and Ralph Fiennes

Action Scenes

Nay!

Messy Plot

No Substance

Incoherent

Poor Plot Twist

Final Thoughts

The King’s Man is a great study at how to be completely incoherent. It is a film that doesn’t really know what it wants to be and introduces more plot points that it can chew on. There are definitely some enjoyable moments to it, but nothing comes close to what Vaughn achieved with Kingsman: The Secret Service.

Rating:1.0

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 13, 2022 07:02 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).