I would throw the movie in the same bucket with the recent films Uncharted and Red Notice: Things happen.
You probably shouldn’t expect much more of it than that. To the extent that there’s a plot, it’s purely in service to things happening. People fight in a place; they run through a place; bombs are defused; bombs are set; dancing; eating; someone turns on someone; etc. These are all well-filmed and presented in a very dramatic way, and none of it really means anything, it’s just flashing pictures with a whiff of a meaningful path from one event to the next. You can tell that they came up with a series of cool scenes that they’d like to film, with an artist coming in to show how awesome it would look, and then they worked back from that to create a framework that links them together.
Probably the best and worst thing to say about it is that they’re relatively faithful to history. That’s nice from the standpoint of appreciating that someone actually poked their nose in a history book but it feels like it only hurt their ability to try and tell a coherent story and, more importantly, it just highlights the Rocky and Bullwinkle quality of the main villain. It’s like gluing Roger Rabbit into Apocalypse Now and expecting it to gell, somehow.
In general, I wouldn’t say that I hated it or really had any opinion. It’s better than flashing pretty desktop wallpapers one after the other, but you’d be hard pressed to say what’s different between the two experiences.
I’m mostly with gdave - they spent way too much time on a plot that didn’t deserve that much focus.
One thing that I thought was strange was that they showed some of the darker parts of history, but not in a way that affects the plot in ways it should. The general who appears in the first scene is presented positively later, and the main character’s rejection of going to foreign countries and murdering the inhabitants is kind of presented as a character flaw. I can enjoy movies of mindless violence, but only if I divorce it from the reality of how most violence is used. Showing in the actual consequences of violence is odd choice for a movie that seems to want you to uncritically cheer for the main characters to do a lot of fun violence.
Yeah, it’s funny, but it’s also kind of accurate, in terms of the Kingsman universe. The whole point of creating the Kingsmen was to try to prevent the kind of mass slaughter seen during the First World War.
As depicted in the movie, the Kingsman agents are clearly absolute bad-asses in a fight, and have access to technologies that make them even more bad-ass. They specialize in tightly controlled, small-scale, focused violence, the purpose of which is to prevent an outbreak of mass violence like a war or major terrorist attack.
Think about it - do we ever see a Kingsman causing “collateral damage”? The only case I can think of is the big fight in the church in the first movie, and that was kind of the point of that movie. A machine that encourages random violence on a massive scale is the exact opposite of what a Kingsman should be.
Yeah, that’s the problem with a lot of origin stories. By their nature, they can’t really show the things that made the original movies interesting, because they’re telling the story of how those over-the-top things came to be.
As a standalone movie, it would have been middling. There was global intrigue and serviceable action scenes, but occasionally incoherent and worst of all, dragged at times.
But as a Kingsman movie, it kind of sucked. As others have noted, it didn’t have the fun of the first movie (and even some of the 2nd). The over-the-top scenes weren’t really over the top.
There was also way too much tonal dissonance throughout. This is a fun movie! But we’re also going to kill the beloved son. I get that it’s in service to the plot, but geez, what a downer for a fun movie. And the entire scene with Rasputin: the cake, upper leg massages, young adults (boys?) trying to seduce him - I was too skeeved out by everything in that scene to enjoy any part of it.
I enjoyed Rasputin’s fighting style, with the dramatic dance moves. It’s a shame the rest of the movie didn’t echo that tone more consistently.
The silent hand-to-hand combat in no man’s land was pretty entertaining. The sudden and horrifyingly wasteful death of the son was done really well.
I liked that they (more or less) stayed in the actual historical framework of the events they were depicting. Rasputin really was poisoned and shot at a party. Gavrilo Princip really did get a lucky second chance to assassinate the archduke.
It was fun to imagine our “known” history of events being a veneer covering up a secret battle of spies and counterspies.
It was obvious that the bad guy was going to be somebody surprising, and I never successfully predicted who it was going to be. The problem is that I just… didn’t care beyond thinking, “oh, we’re obviously setting up a “what a twist!” moment”. Complete failure to invest me in the reveal.
So a decent movie but with a great many missed opportunities to be better.
Until the USA entered the war (and even then arguably ) all the major participants were warmongering imperialistic powers with idiots for leaders. The Great War isn’t like WW2, with a pretty clear line of Good (or at least kinda good) and Evil. There were no Good Guys. The Kaiser was no worse and no better. Read The Sleepwalkers.
IMHO it was the French that pushed it to be a World War. They were so eager for revenge that they gave Russia millions of gold francs to build military raillines so that Russia could mobilize vs Germany, and also plenty of armaments too. Serbia started it by the assassination, of course. Plenty of guilt for the Kaiser also, sure.
I agree with most of what @Just_Asking_Questions said above and I generally liked the movie in large part because it did dial back the cartoonishness and had a more serious plot. That said, it was definitely a very different tone from the earlier movies, so I understand how others could be disappointed by that.
I sort of think of the Kingsman films as a ridiculous over-the-top British version of the XXX films which were ridiculous over-the-top American versions of the Bond films which were ridiculous over-the-top versions of standard spy films. Using my completely arbitrary and just-made-up scale of ridiculousness, I’d put this somewhere in the between Bond film and XXX range.
And I’m mostly (pretty much entirely, actually) with you there.
Think global (wars and how to prevent them). Fight local (hand-to-hand combat against pro-war conspiracies).
Yep. Bits of that were prominently featured in the trailer, which set me up to expect something much more like the first movie, and I wound up being disappointed.
On their own, as set-pieces, I agree. But they also kind of seemed like they were in a different movie from a lot of other scenes.
Yeah, I kind of liked that bit. I think I would have liked it a lot more if they had actually leaned into the “veneer” part a lot more. Like having one of the characters point out that having the Tsar’s closest advisor assassinated by well-connected British aristocrat could be disastrous, so they covered it up by making it seem like he was killed by rival Russian courtiers.
Yeah, that part of the movie really didn’t work for me. So, there’s a secret international conspiracy behind the Great War? Ok, cool, that’s a pretty good historical super-spy premise. And the conspiracy includes Mata Hari, Rasputin, Erik Jan Hanussen, V.I. Lenin, and…Gavrilo Princip? The Tsar’s closest advisor and a random low-level Serbian nationalist are apparently co-equals at the head of the conspiracy? …okay… And they want to …I guess overthrow the monarchies of Europe? It’s not really clear. And then the shadowy leader of the conspiracy that orchestrated the Great War, who commands absolute and unquestioning obedience from some of the most prominent figures of the early 20th Century, is…some random Scottish dude? Who I guess is mad because the English took his family’s mill? Oh, wait, he was also Lord Kitchener’s aide in a couple of scenes earlier in the movie…so I guess that counts as a shocking reveal?
Yeah, a poorly-realized villain is always a problem with a movie like this. Part of what made the first movie great was you really understood what the villain was trying to do, and why, plus, Samuel L Jackson, for god’s sake!
This movie would have been better if the horrors of WWI were played straight in the first act - show how the combined stupidity of people both great and small contributed to the near-destruction of European civilization. Then have the second act be the establishment of the Kingsmen, and then a third act where they foil someone in the 1920s who has some Evil Plan to Do Something.
That still wouldn’t have been as good as the first movie (see: origin stories: problems with, discussed above), but it would have made a better movie than what we got.
What did strike me is that it did get some of the history spot on, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was kind of the same, failed assassination, shot in an alley after a wrong turn. I also didn’t realise that Kitchener (a famous general, who history did not treat well for the tactics leading to slaughter of millions of men) was lost at sea on the way to Russia.
One thing I did think they get wrong, which was strange (given they’d got other things right), was the idea that Germany was naval blockading the UK with its U-boats in WW1. The UK was blockading Germany, and this was pretty much the main reason Germany lost the war. It was WW2 where Germany was sinking the supply ships and trying to starve out the UK. It’s possible that was true, and I missed it, but its not listed as significant compared to the blockade of Germany.
Germany absolutely blockaded the UK during WW1. Their use of unrestricted submarine warfare to do so was one of the factors that turned foreign sentiment against them.
I don’t know where you’re seeing it “not listed”, but Germany absolutely used U-boats to impose a naval blockade on the UK in World War I to try to starve it into submission - and it nearly succeeded:
The film also spends a lot of time on the Zimmerman Telegram, but the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 were much more important factors in U.S. entry into the war (which, contra the depiction in the film, was driven by public outrage in the U.S., not by the fiat of the King of America U.S. President).
Fair enough, it’s been a long time since I read WW1 books, so can’t remember much details. I know the blockade of Germany was very effective, due to the British Empire’s navy strength, and the revolutions in the German cities are what stopped the war, due to starvation, and led to the myth of being betrayed…
Yeah, that was my understanding too, that the Lusitania was the main reason for the entry in the way, and it went unmentioned. I had forgotten about the telegram.
So vaguely historically based. Well, apart from the Rasputin nonsense…
Matthew Vaughn’s right-wing views were more openly on display in this third entry in the series than in the first two, but they’re certainly present in all three.
As you point out, this third one was definitely pro-authoritarianism, with even the USA ruled by King Woodrow Wilson (as someone else pointed out in another part of the thread). WW was the sole decision-maker on American entry into World War 1? Okaaaaaaay…
Vaughn is good at throwing some distractors into the mix to keep viewers from seeing the right-wing underpinnings. In the first movie, the most prominent example would be having the protagonist come from a ‘working class’ UK background, and be told that he could ascend into the Correct Class if only he had the right manners (and clothes, of course). Still, it was pretty clear that aspiring to be U was the done thing, old boy.
That’s Matthew Vaughn. He’s as pro-aristocracy as Julian Fellowes; he just has more taste for sadistic violence that humiliates its victims than Mr. Downton Abbey has. (Look at the way the WW1 soldiers died in Vaughn’s movie, and compare it with the deaths in virtually any other modern WW1 movie: the Vaughn characters die like characters in a Grand Theft Auto game. Empathy is completely absent; it’s just ‘ooo, that’s a cool effect, the way the back of his head blew out!’)
I did like Rasputin’s dancing, but that was about it.
ETA: I also liked Tom Hollander’s triple role.
And: turns out it was gdave who made the King Wilson reference:
