During the Anglo-Boer War, Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) loses his wife, with whom, as a member of the Red Cross, he came to inspect the conditions of prisoners in a British camp. Dying, she asks her husband to protect their son from the horrors of war, and he decides to keep his promise at all costs. Therefore, when the First World War begins, Orlando does not allow young Conrad (Harris Dickinson) to go to the army, despite all the boy’s objections. Soon, however, they will still have to enter the world conflict: they learn that the war is invisibly controlled by a certain evil organization seeking to destroy Great Britain. It includes Gavrilo Princip, Erik Jan Hanussen, Mata Hari, and Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), and some mysterious Scotsman, diligently hiding his face, is pulling the strings.
You want to respect the Kingsman franchise, if only for the fact that it develops in completely different ways each time than expected. “The Golden Ring” turned an ironic spy action movie into an absurdist cringe comedy - which seems to have angered many fans of the first part (we will dwell on the fact that this is one of the best sequels of the XXI century). And “The Beginning” is not just “Kingsman during the First World War,” as one might think from trailers with Rasputin dancing dashingly. But rather an old-fashioned adventure novel: much more down-to-earth and melodramatic than its predecessors.
However, it has not completely lost its signature crazy spark. Now, humor on the verge and wild, stunningly choreographed action scenes - with Rasputin performing ballet pas in the middle of a fight, or a German soldier with a blade instead of a hand - coexist with a completely serious military drama. A poignant story of a man who closed himself off from the terrible world around him and tried to maintain neutrality at a time when everyone around him needed help the most. The film balances between sardonic and tragic and, unfortunately, does not always accurately maintain this difficult line.
Director Matthew Vaughn seems not to understand what to do with the historical context, which lies on the film like a heavy burden. He, on the one hand, wants to maintain a sarcastic grin, to show history through an ironic revisionist lens: hence the villainous organization, consisting exclusively of real historical figures, and the funny decision that all three European rulers - Tsar Nicholas, King George and Kaiser Wilhelm - are played by the same actor Tom Hollander (because in life they were cousins). Some scenes even make you wonder how activists-patriots have not yet turned their eyes on the picture.
But at the same time, it is clear that Vaughn treats the events of the First World War with great reverence - a feeling that the past Kingsmans certainly did not suffer from. Even in a moment of triumph, the heroes do not forget to remind that the war was won by the efforts of millions of dead soldiers. Here they constantly quote news reports and often get distracted by a brief explanation of the state of affairs at the front. Scenes from the front line are devoid of any (well, almost any) crazy expression: finding himself in the trenches of the British army, the film resembles “1917”, and not an ironic spy thriller.
Perhaps these genre transitions would not be so striking if the timing was a little longer. Despite the fact that the film is only 10 minutes shorter than “The Golden Ring” and a minute longer than the first film, “The Beginning” feels like the most hectic part of the franchise. The film needs to do too much: to outline the historical context, to introduce the characters to the center of real events, to reveal the family drama of the Oxfords and still leave time for action. 131 minutes is clearly not enough for the picture: it jumps from episode to episode as if about half an hour had been cut out of it. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, for example, appears in only a couple of scenes, but in the final he somehow turns out to be one of the founders of Kingsman. As if he had a separate storyline that remained on the editing table. It is not clear who is to blame for this: Vaughn himself or the Disney studio, which the film got along with the purchase of Fox, and whether the film has any mysterious Director’s Cut, but I would definitely like to see its extended version. There are much more ambitions here than can be accommodated in such a timing.
The Inconsistencies of King’s Man
Inconsistency is the main problem of King’s Man. But, oddly enough, it is what makes the film so intriguing. In a world where all blockbusters are made according to well-established schemes and exclusively with the approval of focus groups, it is nice to see a movie that constantly makes you wonder where it will turn next - and almost always deceives expectations (this does not apply to the final twist, it is quite boring). Matthew Vaughn arranges for the viewer a kind of dramatic attraction, where tonality and rhythm live their own lives: you just watched an absurd comic book movie, and you are already watching Rafe Fiennes’ character drinking from grief. In the end, King’s Man, even in the worst moments, looks like a film made by a living person, and not an advanced algorithm - which can no longer be said about most modern blockbusters.
Final Thoughts
And this person, even making mistakes, is always looking for new ways to make the viewer “cool”, to do something like that and charge each scene with wild energy. Therefore, even an unsuccessful “Kingsman” is still better than a dozen blockbusters with Ryan Reynolds or Skala.