Film A Mixed Bag, But the Worst Parts Are Just Mixed
I'm only a casual fan of this film franchise. The first one's pretty good, if a bit too over-the-top and self-aware for my tastes, and the second one... eh and bleh. So, in that context, I actually had fairly high hopes for The King's Man. First, because I thought mixing the classic tuxes-and-gadgets spy movie with the early 20th Century period piece was a genuinely inspired idea, and second because I'm a history buff and a bunch of historical supervillains will always appeal to me more than some pastiche of our boring modern billionaire class.
Does it work? Mostly.
As an egalitarian republican, I appreciate that when we see the man who we understand will one day build the Kingsmen, he's not a paternalistic jingoist, but a sensitive, principled pacifist who is all too aware of just how bullshit the mythology surrounding aristocracy is; that he should give back to the world not out of a sense of noblesse oblige but because he won the parental lottery through no qualifications of his own and it's the least he can do.
I also appreciate that, while the action set pieces and boss fights remain fun and breezy fantasy, the film, as part of a trend of recent movies grappling with World War I, goes out of its way to try to be respectful towards the actual people who actually died in the actual war. One hero on that front going through a mild breakdown in a sympathetic figure who's objectively even worse off really got to me, and his tragic, pointless death helps underscore the film's overall theme of war's tragic, pointless waste... even if I wish they hadn't undermined it by making his death a critical step to bringing America into the war.
As to the historical supervillains, I resent that people saying Rasputin is the best part of the film are essentially correct, because I think that the rest of the early 20th Century Legion of Doom could easily have matched him if they were given more to do. And unfortunately, the weak link there is also their leader, a figure whose disappointing motives compound with the obvious question of how he yoked all these more-interesting personalities under his will drag down the big finale. He's not an entirely charismaless void or anything, but he should've been a henchman rather than the final boss. I also wonder if part of that wasn't an attempt to avoid just making all the bad guys foreigners through making their secret master a Brit, but even there the film undermines itself by making him so very Scottish.
I also think having the villains overload the airtime with fuck-words was a bit much, but it's not only nothing new for the franchise, it gives them some identity as Lower Class Louts.
On the whole, even if I don't think the film lived up to its full potential, I do think it mostly pulled off the idea of mixing the over-the-top fun of a classic globe-trotting spy adventure with a costume drama period piece, and I hope to one day see more such experiments.
Film Perplexingly Bad
Disney's Marvel Universe has a lot to answer for in regards to the modern blockbuster, but one thing that can't be said about them is that they don't know how to tell a story. Marvel have machine engineered the means for manufacturing a plot to such a degree of accuracy that they can make a perfectly functional film out of the most ludicrous of characters or scenarios. I hold this in contrast to The King's Man, a 100 million dollar movie that fails at the most basic standards of writing to function as a movie. It's a cliché, but if we say Marvel is fast food cinema, then The King's Man is the equivalent of three week old truck stop sushi; utterly unpalatable and barely recognisable as food.
For starters, The King's Man can't even decide who its protagonist is. Ray Fiennes is present, playing the part of the pacifistic Duke of Oxford, but the story isn't particularly close to him for much of the run time. It spends a while with Oxford's son, Conrad, setting him up as the action lead only to suddenly stop doing that half way through. So then its back to Oxford to carry the story, even though the movie has done none of the work of establishing our emotional connection with him. It seems like such a basic thing to fuck up, and yet here is King's Man, fucking 100 million dollars into the stratosphere.
King's Man has a lot of difficulty with pacing. Anyone coming to the third movie in the Kingsmen franchise expects a fun action romp, but King's Man is 100 minutes of aimless conversation before three short action scenes that all happen in the second half of the movie. It's excruciatingly boring. It's not even as if the talking is particularly insightful or clever; this is a movie in which the leaders of the World are being duped into the First World War by an evil Scottish goat herder. Oxford shares po-faced musings about the evils of war whilst Conrad moans every scene about not being allowed to fight (he's as bored as we are).
We see brief flickers of the black comedy spirit from previous movies. Rasputin steals every scene he is in, and just for fun of it, the rulers of Britain, Germany and Russia are all played by the same actor. There is nowhere near enough of this imagination to go around though. The movie forgoes a lot of the tasteless humour of the previous films, but doesn't replace it with any other kind of comedy. Instead it goes for achingly serious depictions of World War One, complete with melancholic poetry recital. Wonder Woman did a better job of balancing visually exciting action with respectful depictions of the war, and that movie had a model in a miniskirt clomping over the trenches.
King's Man isn't just bad, it is bizarrely incompetent. I don't understand how a movie so lacking in cohesion and structure can even be made in this day and age, and yet here we are. Under no circumstances should anyone waste their time with this. Leave this truck stop sushi in the bin.
Film Enjoyable, but has a bit of an identity crisis.
I watched The King's Man around the time it came out in theaters, and it was a mostly enjoyable experience, better than the second one at the very least. It offers a lot of good comedy and enjoyable action. Unfortunately, it has a hard time deciding where it should be on the Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness. On one hand, the movie does not really focus on making sense. The world leaders are given hilariously petty reasons for conflicts with each other, most antagonists are either Obviously Evil, or rely a lot on Camp, and it contains a lot of immensely cliched elements. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. If the movie would be silly like this all the time, those aspects would make it even more enjoyable. And then the movie tries to handle heavily dramatic elements like death and the horrors of war, and those attempts fall rather flat due to the Mood Dissonance. The "trench mission" scene is probably the best example of this problem. On one hand, we have a fight with masked German soldiers wielding blunt weapons, which would work if the scene aimed for how ridiculous, yet scary the situation is. And then the fight ends with the protagonist being the only one left alive, played entirely for drama. This disconnection between tones is where the movie fell flat for me. Don't get me wrong. I still found the movie enjoyable. I just believe it should have embraced its silliness, rather than tried to balance it with serious subjects. In conclusion, the movie easily peaked when Rasputin showed up, for the aforementioned reasons.
Film Undone by self-sabotage
In a sentence: this movie has all the makings of a great film, but it's fatally undermined by its terrible premise.
Elaborating more on that, it can't decide whether it wants to be a real WWI movie, or a goofy What If Beethoven Was an Alien Spy movie. Just when you think you're safely in Ludicrousville with the scheming Scot who somehow has Gavrilo Princip, Erik Jan Hanussen, and fucking Rasputin all unquestioningly under his thumb, you're faced with the brutal realities of how WWI was actually fought. And when you've put on your serious cap and are ready to really face what went on in those four terrible years, the movie yanks you right back to Gooftown with the "revelation" that WWI was started from scratch by a random yokel in a position of precisely zero power or influence. Oil and water don't mix and neither do the two crucial elements of this film.
It's really a damn shame, because there is a lot to like about it. Ralph Fiennes is brilliant in the lead role and the rest of the cast more than pulls their weight. The action is top-notch and the cinematography is excellent (barring a few bizarre camera choices in the final fight). If the movie had simply been set in World War I, and perhaps had a smaller-scale plot involving treason against the Empire or simply a desire to bring the war to a close as easily as possible, it would be a great film and a perfect origin story for the organization. But they had to have the dog be the mastermind, and the movie just doesn't survive that fateful decision.