Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Matthew Vaughan
Screenplay by Matthew Vaughan and Karl Gajdusek
Story by Matthew Vaughan
Based on ‘The Secret service’ comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons

2021 / 2022 streaming

CAST
Ralph Fiennes – Orlando, Duke of Oxford
Gemma Arteton – Polly
Djimon Hounsou – Shola
Rhys Ifan – Rasputin
Harry Dickenson – Conrad Oxford
Matthew Goode – The Shepherd / Captain Morton
Tom Hollander- George V / Kaiser Wilhelm / Czar Nicholas II
Charles Dance- Lord Kitchener
Aaron Taylor – Lance Corporal Archie Reid
Joel Basman – Princip
Valerie Pachner- Mata Hari
Alexandra Maria Lara – Emily, Duchess of Oxfords
Todd Boyce – Alfred DuPont
Ron Cook- Archduke Ferdinand
Stanley Tucci- American ambassador
Ian Kelly- President Woodrow Wilson
Branka Katic – Czarina Alexandra

Let’s get this out of the way first. It’s third in a “franchise” after Kingsman: The Secret Service in 2014, and Kingsman: The Golden Circle in 2017. A fourth is due soon. I thought a ‘franchise’ was where you bought the local rights to use a brand name, so that Spec savers and many chain restaurants are franchises.Here it seems to mean simply “series.”

The first two are set in modern times. The whole “franchise” (WTF?) is based on a comic book series, now part of Marvel. So the third is a prequel. Is it? That’s film talk. In comic book terms this is the Origin Ish. (Origin Issue). It was due out in 2019, but got postponed eight times before its Christmas week release in 2021. You can see how often the release was announced by the dates on the movie posters on IMDB. Now it’s streaming.

Why Kingsman? It is a private secret service agency based on a London tailor shop called Kingsman. No, we haven’t seen the first two. No, we are unlikely to see the first two. Nor the fourth.

The origin issue sets out to show how the agency was formed by Orlando, Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes). Yes, I know it was the Earl of Oxford in Elizabethan times. The aristocrat gets promoted. The review at Robert Ebert website sums up the issue. The director is stuck veering between a daft comic spy caper (think Johnny English) and a remake of 1917. Serious stuff is shoehorned in about violence and pacifism and nothing worth dying for, then a Great War sequence which is violent and just the opposite. It’s hasn’t a clue where it is.

Take the start. The Boer War in South Africa. We are told that this is a British concentration camp (it is where they started), and we get a half second glimpse of two or three starving Boers behind barbed wire. So a bit of political significance, but blink and you’ll miss it. The Duke (aka Oxford) is visiting with his wife, Emily, and son, Conrad, for the Red Cross, with their faithful servant Shola. A Boer sniper kills the Duchess, and the young son watches. The dying duchess makes Oxford promise to protect her son.

The screen says twelve years later.Just possible, the war ended in 1902. Oxford has a smart biplane (a 1920s model) and is at his country house. (It’s probably near Oxford too – it looks like the one we used for filming Double Identity an ELT video). On the svelte lawns the brave and faithful Man Friday / Chingachook / Tonto /Queequeg Shola is teaching Conrad the ancient art of hand to hand combat.

War is about to start. We have the three warring first cousins, all grandsons of Queen Victoria, … King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Czar Nicholas II of Russia. This closely related trio has always summed up the ludicrous nature of the Great War. We also see them as boys, fighting over toy soldiers.

In perhaps the cleverest move of the film, all three are played by Tom Hollander. I bet that was a swine to do what with costume and make up. Oxford has to stop the war.

We realize that there is a group of three … Oxford, Shola and Polly, the no-nonsense North Country nanny … who have a secret room behind the library. These three will found the spy agency which works via a network of domestic servants worldwide reporting back to them.

We see a plateau on a narrow tower of rock. Like The Lost World but much smaller and narrower and higher. It’s accessed by a one man hoist, and inhabited by The Shepherd, a mysterious Scot, who keeps his head turned away from camera until the last minutes of the film, while mistreating his goats. He lives in a draughty barn, though as he’s a Scot he probably finds the fresh air ‘bracing.’ This is the man behind all world evil plots. Dr No. Blofeld. Sauron. The Joker. Whatever. The basis of this plot is to start a World War during which The Shepherd can secure Scottish independence.That seems a tad extreme even for Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.

History is going to be messed with. Oxford is off to Sarajevo to protect the Archduke Ferdinand. The anarchist Princip throws a bomb, misses the Hapsburgs but blows up the car behind. He goes for a cup of coffee to get over it just round the corner. The alarmed Archduke, his wife, and Oxford turn into a cul de sac right by the coffee shop. Princip shoots them.

Next stop Russia, where the evil and violent Putin (should that be Ras Putin?) is poisoning the Czar’s heir, probably with Novichok. Mr and Mrs Romanov (as they will become briefly in 1917 before their decease) are fooled. Putin is a member of The Shepherd’s gang (“The Flock.”). Putin needs to be assassinated for the sake of world peace, and Oxford’s the man for the job (if only). They meet Ras Putin at a party and want to use the comely Oxford son, Conrad, to lure Ras Putin into a possible homosexual tryst … perceptive. That bare chested Putin horseback stuff always looked as if he imagined it was a gay pin up pose. The trouble is Ras is more interested in a pair of prostitutes, or possibly Grand Duchesses. At this point, we realize that the adjective ‘fucking’ and the verb ‘fuck’ are being used an exceptionally high number of times for 1916. Instead Ras takes a fancy to Oxford Senior and has him take his trousers off so he can heal the leg wound which was inflicted trying to save Emily in South Africa. Mmm.

The film is going badly for us at this point. Poor Ralph Fiennes is his boxers and sock suspenders being asked to put his leg on Putin’s lap while he has his thigh caressed. Karen has taken exception to me singing Rah Rah Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen every time Ras Putin appears. She never liked Bony M. I point out that ‘czarina’ is more accurate than ‘queen’ because she was an empress. That bit of pedantry on my part has not helped.

We were about to abandon it, then the best bit of the film appears – a dramatic sword fight with Cossack twirling set to The 1812 Overture. Yes, it’s all SFX and the music is overwhelming, but it is impressive. It leads us to stick with it.

Young Conrad, virtue intact, is determined to join the army, something Oxford swore not to let him do. So the Duke does a deal with his pal George V (Oxford is The King’s Man … geddit?) to keep the young Lieutenant away from the action.

Conrad sees a Scottish soldier called Archie Reid, I was about to start singing the Andy Stewart song (There was a soldier … a Scottish soldier …), but after the response to Rah Rah Rasputin, I thought better of it. They swap clothes and off Conrad marches to the front, kilt swirling. None of his fellow Black Watch platoon notice the swap. So next a British spy is running between the front lines with a vital piece of information. He gets blown up, and they need six men to go out and get the information from his pocket. Conrad / Archie volunteers and we are into1917 with a well-staged night fight in No mans land … the Germans are trying to retrieve it too.

It ends with Archie / Conrad doing a heroic run and saving the now one-legged spy, only for a Black Watch Sergeant to say ‘That’s nae Scottish accent’ and then shooting him. It has taken the platoon a long time to notice that.

The vital information is a letter from Zimmerman (no, not Robert Zimmerman) to Mexico asking them to invade the USA so as to keep the USA from joining the war. This might have been a good time to recapture Greater California, before Trump started on The Wall. Oxford discovers that the reason the USA won’t enter the war, is because a Flock member (weren’t they an early 70s band with Jerry Goodman on violin?) is the spy Mata Hari. She has filmed herself seducing US President Wilson on grainy black and white film, and they threaten that these blurred images of what might be a striptease will be revealed to the censorious American public if he does declare war. What a thought! An American president being involved in such hanky-panky. Impossible.

Also impossible would be surreptitious filming. Note the size and loud noise of a 1917 movie camera … the noise was a major problem when sound film arrived.

Oxford confronts Mata Hari at the US Embassy. He sees at once that her cashmere scarf is from a rare mountain goat that can only be found on top of one high, narrow, plateau somewhere in some mountains in some country. Off he goes with Shola and Polly for the final fight, which does involve more most impressive derring-do SFX.

It’s a very silly film. It is billed as an action comedy. Fair enough. The ‘franchise’ must be making enough money to lure such a stellar cast. Look at the cameos even … Charles Dance, Stanley Tucci, Ron Cook. Maybe it was fun to be in it.