I have been both anticipating and dreading sitting down to watch this feature in the cinema. And for reasons beyond the larger-scale “Sarge, we keep getting orders to let the virus win” idiocy that is the third year of the pandemic. On the one hand, it’s the latest Kingsman film, a series I have grown to love in all its suave ridiculousness, and having seen all of Matthew Vaughn’s directorial efforts to date, the man is yet to make a bad film. Flawed films? Oh, certainly; The Golden Circle had its share of issues. But never anything outright bad. As such, I’ve been hedging my bets on this film as my first review (on this blog, at least) for 2022, wanting to start things off on a good note.
But on the other hand, not only is Vaughn’s regular writing partner Jane Goldman not returning for this entry, in her place is a writer by the name of Karl Gajdusek. Readers who are fans of Stranger Things might recognise that name as the showrunner for its first season, but me? I only know his name for his absolutely putrid work on the script for The Last Days Of American Crime. And considering this is not only a film in a comic-book-adjacent universe, but also serves as the origin story for the titular spy agency, him being here isn’t inspiring a lot of confidence.
And unfortunately, while I refrain from saying this comes anywhere close to the dumbest moments in Last Days, it’s still another example of this franchise failing to measure up to its excellent first instalment. It’s set just before and during World War I, using the setting and its characters’ place within it to build up Kingsman as an organisation that needed to exist, as does the entire branch of espionage during war time. A way of dealing with conflict that doesn’t have to involve so many needlessly lost lives.
However, while Ralph Fiennes’ lead performance as the Duke of Oxford helps anchor a lot of the film’s more emotional moments, namely to do with his relationship with his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson), the film around him is Kingsman in splintered name only. There are flashes of that familiar kinetic energy, like with Rasputin's hopak fighting style, but most of this film eschews the over-the-top action and roguish sense of humour for a more self-serious tone. This wants to be a more mature take on notions of war and what it means to be a ‘gentleman’, but in the process of jettisoning so much of what made the first and even second films so much fun, it ends up feeling rather generic and, even worse, drab compared to what came before.
It doesn’t help that the insistence on being taken seriously (which really wasn’t the case for the other films) ends up revealing quite a few issues with its own take on war and the politique behind it. Now, these films have always had an undercurrent of right-wing ideology to them; the villains of the last two films were tied to (what are commonly perceived to be) left-wing causes like combating global warming and decriminalising drug use. Then again, that’s the dirty secret behind a lot of action cinema, so Vaughn isn’t alone in that, and it wasn’t so overt as to become unpleasant to watch. The closest they ever did get to that sensation is with the infamous church shootout in Secret Service, and even then, it’s less to do with feeling bad for Westboro Baptist stand-ins dying than it is with the idea that that whole fight was out of the control of those being part of it. A fitting setup for this film’s own take on large-scale conflict, now that I think about it.
But for as much as Vaughn and Gajdusek try to depict warfare as a bipartisan issue, showing all sides (Britain, Russia, America, Germany, etc.) being just as blindly bloodthirsty as each other and all led into their involvement (or, in some cases, persuaded out of it) by members of the villain’s inner circle, there’s still an undercurrent of elitism to what’s going on. Again, nothing new for the series that began with turning a lad into a near-literal lord in Eggsy, but something feels particular off with how it’s shown here. It starts out well enough, emphasising that those in positions of privilege should use that power to help others and not just hide behind their status, but when the Scottish, aristocrat-hating, ‘damn the British for what they did to our country’ villain shows up in The Shepherd… yeah, there’s where the discomfort seeps in. As has the eye-rolling cynicism at the heart of Last Days, from the look of things.
Don’t get me wrong, though; it’s not as if this film is devoid of positive things. Rhys Ifan as Rasputin may be the only one here who feels consistent to the larger Kingsman aesthetic in terms of tone, but that only makes him that much more fun to watch on-screen. The core message about the ethics of war and the necessity of espionage may be on shaky ground, but when it finds a consistent chord to strike (like with a central scene involving Conrad running across a battlefield to deliver key intel, while being shot at from both sides), it still resonates. Hell, even with the slanted perspective it gives on royalty vs. government bureaucracy in terms of what causes war to happen in the first place (not to mention its less-than-ideal understanding of pacifism), there’s still enough accuracy to make its bigger statements at least make sense, if not entirely convince.
And that’s the issue right there. It’s not that this film is lacking in fun. It’s that what good things exist here come with some pretty heavy caveats, not the least of which being how dull quite a few stretches of the film can get. With a tone closer to the other two films, all the pro-autocracy, anti-globalist, civility politics would have been far less annoying for me. But since Vaughn and company decided to make the prequel to a blood-splattered Roger Moore tribute into something this po-faced, all the background noise of the series up to now is becoming a little too loud to properly engage with what the film has going for it.
With any luck, this is just a showing of Vaughn wanting to get out of this franchise, seeing as his next film is another spy film but one completely detached from this universe. Hopefully, that film will turn out alright… but then again, there’s apparently another Kingsman entry in the works, so yeah, definitely looking forward to how much worse the diminishing returns can get with this series that is increasingly showing that it shouldn’t have been a series. Man, do I hope I’m wrong on that one.
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