My general feeling on the Kingsmen movies is that they are often over-the-top spy satires with a lot of crazy set pieces that the viewer should not think for one minute too hard about, particularly the movies’ politics. Given the way comic book writer Mark Millar tends to write stories, this would seem to be something of a faithful adaptation because he often goes for crazy and hyperviolent, but when I read the trade for his original story, I was actually surprised how relatively tame it was compared to the movie. Regardless, these are “guilty pleasure” style movies, one where you can just go in, sit down, turn your brain off, and watch Colin Firth massacre a church full of psychopaths driven murderous by a weird phone signal.
For whatever reason, the third movie in the series is actually an origin story. But hey, everyone loves a good prequel, right?
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To be fair, this movie is set so far in the past that it’s not likely to have much effect on the “present day” portion of the franchise. But not every movie opens during the Boer War and then cuts to 1914 where Orlando, the Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) is an avowed pacifist with a secret. He lost his wife on a Red Cross mission during the aforementioned Boer War, and he has since set up a spy network of his own through faithful servants Shola (Djimon Hounsou) and Polly (Gemma Arterton). Essentially, he knows servants are present and often overlooked everywhere, so with Shola and Polly, they have a network of eyes and ears throughout the Western world. Sure, his son Conrad (Harris Dickenson) wants to serve in the military, especially as war seems to be brewing in Europe, but Orlando has had his fill of violence and would rather not see any more of it if he can help it.
Unfortunately, a mysterious Scotsman, the Shepherd, wants war mostly to destroy the British Empire. He’ll have agents assassinate Franz Ferdinand and then have another get Russia out of the war. That’s right: Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) is among the many historic figures who work for this guy. Orlando will find his values tested by this new threat, but with Conrad, Polly, and Shola’s help, he might be able to do something about all this. Maybe he can’t stop the Great War, but he can perhaps stop the Shepherd.
As much as I say you shouldn’t think about the politics of the Kingsmen movies, you probably shouldn’t think about the history here either. Beyond the various historic figures working for the Shepherd, there’s also how actor Tom Hollander plays King George, the Kaiser, and the Tsar, referring to themselves as cousins despite the fact that they were basically all related by marriage. Still, accuracy has never been director Matthew Vaughn’s strong suit in these films. They’re more about the crazy, and if the first movie had Colin Firth as an unlikely action hero superspy, this one does more or less the same thing with Fiennes. As long as these movies continue to do the over-the-top insanity that the series is known for, it should be a good time at the movies.
That said, this one doesn’t get anywhere near as nutty as the previous two movies in this franchise. To be sure, when the movie does go for the crazy action scenes, it goes all-out, and there’s not much crazier than this movie’s depiction of Rasputin. But much of this movie seemed, well, quiet and subdued. This is a series that had most of the world’s leaders’ heads explode in a brightly-colored firework as a “happy” ending while the other had robotic dogs that wouldn’t attack Elton John. The bad guys in those movies were trying to stop climate change and the War on Drugs, and the very idea of an independent spy agency that somehow knows better than everyone can be seen as a bit much. Maybe it’s because of the time period or Vaughn figuring he can only change what happened but so much, but I didn’t find the movie to be as nuts as I had hoped. But when it did go there, oh man, it went there in the glorious Kingsmen fashion, so really, while I wouldn’t put it on par with the previous two movies, I would most assuredly still say this was a lot of fun.
Grade: B-
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