Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The King’s Man’ on Hulu and HBO Max, the ‘Kingsmen’ Franchise Prequel That Challenges Us to Give a Damn

The Hulu and HBO Max menus now offer The King’s Man, a prequel to the two Kingsman films that someone out there was asking for, presumably, whoever they are, I’ve never met one, have you? Note the nomenclatorial alterations, with the apostrophe and stroke of the spacebar, which suggests that the ultraviolent super-secret dapper-gentleman Kingsman spy squad began with one fellow. So don’t expect any familiar faces from the previous films, but it features many recognizable ones, most notably Ralph Fiennes, effectively replacing Colin Firth as the genteel Englishman lead who also can stab the shit out of someone with a sword. Do we care? I don’t know. Probably not. But should we care? That’s the question I’m paid to answer, people.

THE KING’S MAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The first of far too many characters is introduced to us in SOUTH AFRICA, 1902, where the first of far too much plot begins. For some reason, Orlando Oxford (Fiennes) is in this country. Please don’t ask me why. Far too many things happened between these scenes and the end of the movie for me to remember. It’s important because his wife is killed and his son is young and left motherless, thus inspiring Orlando to be an overprotective father 12 YEARS LATER. He’s a Duke, so he lives in one of those sprawling English countryside estates with a staff far outnumbering the actual residents. His son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) is now 18 and raring to join the army and fight in World War I so he can get medals for heroism just like his father. But Orlando is a pacifist now. He’d rather play his Duke card and keep the boy safe. Meanwhile, there’s some political palaver going on, and you don’t want to know, because it’s thunderously boring.

That sets up the movie’s core relationship, I guess, but there are a whole bunch of other characters you might want to know about. Polly (Gemma Arterton) and Shola (Djimon Hounsou) are Orlando’s most loyal servants. Lord Kitchener (Charles Dance) is the British war secretary; Orlando urges him to not ever, ever, ever let Conrad join the military. Elsewhere, a cabal of bad guys forms, led by a mysterious Scotsman, and rendered highly eccentric by the Russian madman Rasputin (Rhys Ifans); their goal is to something something, and I’m being vague not to avoid spoilers, but because it’s too convoluted to inspire a single giveashit. And then there’s King George of England, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and Tsar Nicholas of Russia, all cousins (!), all played by Tom Hollander wearing three different idiotic mustaches, and utilizing three different ludicrous accents.

So before I attempt a Guinness World Record in reductionism by summarizing what all these characters have to do with each other, let’s take a quick inventory: Father trying to keep his son from dying in a gruesome trench war, Russian loon heals people by licking them, one actor caricaturing three world leaders. Scrumptious. Anyway, the war is happening, and Orlando does some spy shit, which implicates him in international politics, and Mother England and her gross-conquest empire is under dire threat, and the attempt to save it involves some feisty goats that are used to make impeccable cashmere, a film of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson getting serviced by a prostitute and British guys jumping out of airplanes using one of them newfangled, whaddayacallem, parachutes. And like the other Kingsmans, nothing gets solved without nutty action and fight sequences. Sound like fun? You’d be wrong.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The movies in this franchise are kind of like the Mission: Impossibles if they were more British and more boring. And as far as no-man’s-land WWI battle sequences go, The King’s Man falls between the masterful War Horse and the reasonably rousing Wonder Woman in terms of depicting trench warfare.

Performance Worth Watching: Fiennes flails in the grip of material that couldn’t find focus in the dictionary under “f.” So let’s go with Ifans as Rasputin, who’s so over the top, he makes a cartoon look like Victorian post-mortem photography.

Memorable Dialogue: Rasputin growls this doozy of a line about Russian culture: “Food, music, ballet, tobacco, art – but most of all… we like to f— like tigers. Grrrrrrrrrr.”

Sex and Skin: Is Rasputin tonguing Orlando’s upper-thigh bullet wound considered a “sex scene”? Let’s go to the judges: No. Despite the visual, and the proximity of the wound to the genitalia, it’s not. Got you on a technicality there. One thing it most definitely is? The most embarrassing movie scene of 2021.

Our Take: Nearly an hour goes by before director Matthew Vaughn – who also helmed the first two films – delivers one of the franchise’s signature action sequences, a nutty clash between Orlando and Rasputin, who flounces like Baryshnikov crossed with Bruce Lee, as the 1812 overture pomps and circumstances on the soundtrack. It’s an amusing and creative bit sandwiched between several miles of drudgery consisting of plodding exposition, repetitive back-and-forth between Orlando and Conrad, political blah blah blah and countless location jumps that introduce more and more characters who have less and less bearing on story advancement (Daniel Bruhl and Matthew Goode turn up here, and it’s barely worth mentioning them).

Surely Vaughn wants his dynamic, rip-roaring action to carry the weight of consequence, but if he pared down to the fights and chases, the story would make just as much sense (note: it doesn’t make much), and it’d be an act of mercy. The parachuting bit is suspenseful, high-stakes slapstick and the no-man’s-land clash, set in the chilling dead of night, is riveting and pressure-packed, but nestled amidst this wearying 131-minute bloat, they act as moments of relief from the burden of trying to follow this convoluted, stultifying mess of a plot.

The film’s tonal whiplash does it no favors, either. Fiennes tries to bring emotional gravity to scenes addressing grief and loss; meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson gets a blowsie and Hollander spreads his mustaches all over the screen as the film attempts to be a ribald, subversive alt-history spoof populated with comic-book villains and OTT caricatures. Its major plot developments carry little dramatic weight, and the big crazy scenes frankly could be crazier. The first film in the series got by on its core irony: well-dressed and -mannered Englishmen partake in extreme violence – keenly directed extreme violence, mind you. The formula just doesn’t work this time. The King’s Man gracelessly attempts to further force-feed a franchise to the world, but it’s flumping around on three flat tires.

Our Call: The King’s Man sets up the story of the British patriotic spy ring using a high-end clothier as its front – but instead of dapper pinstripes, this one’s dressed in a clown suit. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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