Formula: Kingsman: The Secret Service / 1917
Most of the time, these Reactions I write up are meant as reviews of a movie. I try to write them the same as I would if it was for a publication. It’s an easy habit to fall into. I do call these Reactions and not Reviews for a reason though. I use them as my processing tool for the movie. It’s as much about the context of its release or how I saw it as the content of the film itself. That is what I want to react to the most about this movie: the context of the release.
I’m not that invested in the Kingsman franchise. I remember liking the first one with Matthew Vaughn bringing his gleeful violence to a James Bond story. It was a lot of fun. The second movie wore of me the wrong way though. I still can’t figure out exactly why. It threw out a lot of the story in order to riff on the premise more and how it could be extended. So, when I heard about The King’s Man, I wasn’t terribly excited. I do like WWI stories, but it otherwise looked like a retreating reboot: an attempt for Vaughn to play with the original good idea without having to address where he left the franchise after the second movie. I only watched this movie because Licorice Pizza seemed a little too daunting that afternoon.
More than anything, I really want to applaud 20th Century’s ad campaign for this movie. I love when a movie successfully bluffs its way to release. Based on the trailers, this looked like Ralph Fiennes and Harris Dickinson, repeating the Colin Firth and Taron Egerton dynamic, facing Rhys Ifans as Rasputin, this film’s flamboyant villain. It turns out that was a massive misdirect. Rasputin? Dead halfway in. Harris Dickinson? Also dead. It was thrilling to be that surprised by the movie. I noticed early on how almost the entire trailer had been used up by the Rasputin fight. When they killed him, it clicked that they pulled the switcheroo on me. The rest of the movie could be about anything. I then approached it thinking they’d played their one big card. Then Harris Dickinson’s protégé character gets killed. People in my theater actually gasped. No one should be gasping during a Kingsman movie. When talking about twists, I often say that I don’t predict a single twist as much as I’m aware of all the story options available. I don’t know the killer, but I know what the story will look like depending on who the killer is. However, I truly didn’t see Dickinson’s death coming. I wasn’t looking for it. Normally, a misdirect trailer obscures one big twist. Including a second twist is almost overkill. They even use the fact that Fiennes is the biggest star to hide in plain sight. They can put him in the center of the poster just like they put Colin Firth in the middle of the first movie’s poster. So, even though he’s the actual star of the movie, I still went into it thinking he was just a prominent supporting character who earned first billing due to his stature.
The movie itself is OK. The prequel/reboot actually allowed Vaughn to hit a different tone with the film. It’s still hyperviolent but it’s a bit more restrained. The King’s Man doesn’t try so hard to be funny. Really, it’s only a comedy in the sense that it takes such an extreme premise seriously. I needed that after the second movie went too far in the other direction. The story does suffer somewhat due to the misdirects. We spend an awful lot of time with Hunter Dickinson for him to only be a motivation for Ralph Fiennes. Perhaps the more straightforward 110m version of the movie would’ve been more purely entertaining.
This film ends up being about how Ralph Fienne’s Lord Orlando Oxford starts the Kingsmen to stop WWI. He’s a founding member along with Gemma Arterton, his house nanny, Djimon Hounsou, his multi-purpose butler, Stanley Tucci, the U.S. ambassador in England, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, a soldier Harris Dickinson sent home from the front lines of the war in his stead. It sets things up well for sequels set during any post-WWI conflict, and any of those founding member would be welcome back. Fiennes has the same quality as Colin Firth of not being physically imposing but being believable as highly if not casually efficient in a brawl. Studios have been looking for an action franchise for Arterton for nearly a decade now and she only scratches the surface of her physicality in this. I’ll choose to ignore the potential ‘shipping of her and the 24-years-older Fiennes. Hounsou is astoundingly ageless. At 58, I still wouldn’t want to challenge him in a fight. Tucci is mainly there to explain the Statesmen. Taylor-Johnson doesn’t do much at all here. He’s been in action movies before, so I’m guessing Vaughn brought him in with a promise of a sequel.
Even if the movie itself is only ok, it’s hard for me to be negative about something which caught me so off guard. This is a tough movie to recommend, because much of the value of it is in not knowing the surprises. However, the surprises are kind of the reason to watch it. Anyway, I’m glad I came into it cold. That won me over enough to see where else the franchise will go.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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