‘The Kings Man’ Review: Franchise Betrays Itself by Going Soft and Woke

Who removed Matthew Vaughn’s balls? The guy who gave us the beautifully anti-social and inappropriate Kick-Ass (2010), Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015), and Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) is now serving up The King’s Man, a pile of dull, exhausting, oh-so-serious woketardery?

Vaughn is either in the midst of an identity crisis or allowed a bunch of producers and money men to castrate his own franchise. The King’s Man has no idea what it wants to be, is over-plotted beyond belief, and has the gall to be part of the Kingsman franchise and then bloat itself with pretension.

This prequel is being sold as an origin story about the founding of the Kingsman, a secret organization of super spies unattached to any government. Except King’s Man is not about that. Instead, it’s about Duke Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), a rich, English guy-turned-pacifist (by a personal tragedy) who’s determined to trick America into entering World War I.

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That’s not a typo. Oxford is a pacifist who spends most of the movie scheming to get the U.S. into a war. That’s how confused this stinker is.

It gets worse. Oxford teaches his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) to be a ruthless fighting machine while using his privilege and position to ensure Conrad never uses those skills (?) and escapes the draft … you know, even as he schemes to push the U.S. into a war that will eventually kill some 150,000 American boys.

The whole movie is bipolar…

In one scene, we’re being lectured about privilege and colonialism (this from a franchise that gave us a princess who likes it in the butt), and then in the next, Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) is licking Oxford’s leg.

We have a black servant (Djimon Hounsou — whose presence elevates everything), and he’s subservient to Oxford. But then we have a female servant character (Gemma Arterton) who’s an obnoxious mix of a strident Karen and perfectly smug Mary Sue. Boys are so messy, she says, after saving the men … again. The only thing in her butt is a six-foot steel pole. She is beyond unappealing and awful.

We have action sequences staged as over-the-top fun and are then bludgeoned with super-serious sequences about how awful war and violence are.

Excess becomes sentiment.

Hyper-violence becomes anti-violence.

My butt becomes numb.

The plot is ridiculous, but unlike the previous chapters, not in a good way. For whatever reason, instead of honoring what came before with fictional villains right out of the James Bond franchise (before the James Bond franchise sucked), Vaughn decided to set this story within the real geopolitics of World War I. But rather than simplify that complicated time, Vaughn’s opening forty minutes are a tortuous and episodic jumble of plot machinations that has Oxford reacting instead of making things happen. As a result, we’re probably an hour in before the movie settles down, figures out what it’s about, and comes up with a goal.

All the rudeness, the zest, the glorious “screw you” attitude… It’s all gone and replaced by the very same dull and properly PC traits Vaughn has spent a career lifting a middle finger. As our culture becomes more stuffy, proper, and fascist, Vaughn stood as a reliable island of unapologetic misanthropy and profane individualism mixed with traditional themes about family, right and wrong, selflessness, and bettering yourself without losing yourself into a mindless collective.

Kings Man feels like a hostage video, a 1984-style public confession for past sins, an apology from a shell of a man who’s just exited a room where a bunch of Woke Fascists tied a rat cage to his face.

Kingsman fans have been sold out and betrayed by a first-rate director, a third-rate script, and a flurry of politically correct sucker punches.

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