The King's Man

The first Kingsman film had Colin Firth massacring a church full of hateful right wing fundamentalists to the sweet sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird. The second film had our hero being protected from killer robot dogs by Elton John. The third one has Ralph Fiennes being headbutted by a goat. After 100 painfully misguided and quite frankly, mostly boring minutes.

1901. The Second Boer War. Orlando, Duke Of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) becomes a widower and his son Conrad loses his mother Emily (Alexandra Maria Lara) when she's caught up in a battle at a South African prisoner of war camp. 13 years later he's a man of peace but a shadowy cabal of infamous criminals, including one Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans, having a whale of a time), have plans that will see him brought out of retirement when their actions led to the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the imminent start of war in Europe. Conrad (Harris Dickinson), now a man, wants to do his duty and fight for his country and Orlando, terrified of losing another family member to a bullet, sets out to nip things in the bud.

About 80 minutes into The King's Man there's a near silent fight scene between British soldiers and German shock troopers in the middle of No Man's Land on the Somme. It's 90 seconds of choreographed brutality shot in director Matthew Vaughn's action movie style that ultimately leaves a bad taste in your mouth when you remember it's built on the back of what is possibly the most appalling waste of human life in history. It feels woefully misjudged, as does 3/4's of the film, a tonally bizarre mishmash of fact and fiction that wipes out or sidelines it's best characters while filling it's running time with scene after scene of exposition delivered by moustachio'ed men in rooms full of books. If you know your early 20th century history you'll follow it easily but if you don't you won't have a clue whats going on. The audience that got hooked in by the adventures of Eggsy, Harry and Merlin in the previous Kingsman films might well feel quite alienated by it all.

In fact it doesn't feel like part of the Kingsman franchise at all until very late in the day, aside from a early & fun Russian encounter involving a sex mad monk, a poisoned bakewell tart and an inventive use of a tongue. It's exciting, hilarious, violent, the three ingredients we came for and then it's over and we're back in exposition town. It's makes for a frustrating couple of hours when fine actors like Gemma Atherton and Djimon Hounsou as Orlando's fiery cohorts Shola and Polly are swept to the side after you've seen what they are capable of with knives and guns. Ralph Fiennes does his stiff upper lip thing well though and when he's onscreen you'll at least have something to enjoy but when he's not ...... Then when you finally get to see what he's really capable of atop a remote Russian plateau the film sparks into life again but at this stage it's just too little too late. Instead of enjoying the head lopping, horn impaling madness you'll just be thinking to yourself "Why wasn't the rest of the film like this?"

The King's Man is in cinemas now. It's not worth going out in the cold for.