Three hoorays for imperialism!

I watched "The King's Man" yesterday, the prequel to the Matthew Vaughn vehicles Kingsman and Kingsman 2. In it, an impeccable Ralph Fiennes plays Orlando Oxford, the founder of the British Kingsman secret service agency. It's a fucking mess and tonally the most inconsistent movie I've watched in quite a while. 

 

Fair warning: I will spoil the whole thing, so if you want to watch it unspoiled, stop now. 

 

Imagine a movie starting in a Nazi concentration camp, visited by our hero, a high-ranking Nazi, his wife, his son and his Czech butler (because he's a progressive Nazi, he has a good relationship with the butler). Said camp is attacked by Jewish resistance fighters, accidently shooting the wife of our protagonist, who is shown to be the good guy because he brought food to the inmates. He could deliver said food because he's good friends with the commander of the camp. Luckily, the Jewish resistance fighters can be defeated by the Czech butler of our hero. Sounds absurd? It's the opening premise of this movie. 

 

Orlando Oxford is royalty, and he devoted his life to pacifism, trying to prevent war and alleviate suffering. After the tragic death of his wife (in a Boer concentration camp in 1902) he tries to do right be her and shield their son from another war, which, duh, will be World War I. To this end, he journeys to Sarajevo, to help protect Franz Ferdinand (because of course, British nobility would be who the Austrians turn to), but that goes badly. War breaks out, and a bitter Oxford tries to keep his son out of it, who wants nothing so much as to join up and serve. He was trained his whole life by his father, the butler (a South African black man, obviously) and a female sharpshooter. To what end isn't clear, because training as a superhero doesn't exactly cry out "pacifism", but buckle in, it gets weirder. 

 

Responsible for the war is a nefarious secret organization led by a guy whose only shown by the back of his head (but if you deduce which character with any screentime is unaccounted for, you'll get to his identity soon enough) and who uses the war to destroy his archenemy: Britain! To this end, aside from Gavrilo Princip, he employs Rasputin and Daniel Brühl as a generic German villain with a monocle.

Faced with this nefarious conspiracy and the spectre of revolution hanging on the horizon (shocking!), Oxford finally plunges into action. He foregoes his vow never to kill again to kill Rasputin and save millions of lives by...keeping Russia in the war. After the succesful assassination, the nefarious organisation employs Lenin as their next secret weapon, leaving the USA as the only hope. Unfortunately, the nefarious organisation also managed to neutralize the US by trying to entice Mexico to attack (the infamous Zimmerman telegram) and thereby keeping them occupied. 

 

Oxford and his pals manage to do some spywork (not including killing people, which seems important to Oxford at this stage) and decipher the telegram, but the US quite sensibly do not believe the imperialist British, so the original must be found. In the meantime, Oxford's son finally got his wish and entered the frontlines, where he just so happens to find the original, but unfortunately also gets killed.

The US still don't enter the war, because the nefarious organisation has an ace up their sleeve: a sex scandal! Wilson got himself a blowjob by an agent of the organization, and they keep the negative of a movie of said act they somehow shot outside the window of the Oval Office. If not for this negative, the US would enter the war and peace would be saved. Oxfort finally snaps out of his depression, induced by the death of his son, after a stern talking-to from King George, who awards his son the Victoria Cross posthumously. 

 

The crack team of Oxford and his two servants then infiltrates the enemy lair, secures the negative, kills the head of the snake (whom Oxford murders in cold blood with the Victoria Cross of his son) and sends said negative to Wilson, who immediately declares war. This brings instant peace, and Oxford founds the Kingsman secret agency to be deliberately set above governments and utterly unaccountable. The end. 

 

In case you're scratching your head now, yes, this story is a mess. But that recap is nothing against the real thing. Half of the movie wants to be "1917" so badly you can almost see the camerapeople aching to do a one-shot, and the other half is an over-the-top prequel to the other Kingsman-movies, or else a movie that actually wants to have fun with all the bonkers stuff going on. 

 

Unfortunately, once more World War I shows itself to be a poor period to set movies in that are not explictly about the horrors of World War I. This one is no exception. Vaughn seems to have been conscious of the weighty matter he had at his hands, in contrast to his previous two entries which are firmly set in an absurdist, James-Bond-of-the-70s-like alternate universe. But instead of either going all in and firmly creating an alternate timeline to have fun in, the movie tries to actually be about something (I'm not convinced that was wholly Vaughn's doing, so I keep it at the neutral "the movie").

You have a critique of the Boer war and the British concentration camps, monarchs leading their nations to ruin, imperialism eating itself, ruminations about the terror of war, false ideals of masculinity leading to young men signing off to a great adventure and die in the trenches...and then have the movie turn about and glorify each and every one of these things. 

 

As I already mentioned, the commander of the concentration camp is a friend of Oxford's, Lord Kitchener (who will be responsible for the war effort later). Not once is this brought up again; Kitchener instead being shown as a real gentleman (because he does conscript only commoners and not Oxford's blue-blooded son) and vital for the British war effort (which is equated with peace). Concentration camps? Did we see them in the beginning? Why were they there? Does this have something to do with British imperialism? Nah. 

 

The "progressive" side-cast is already parody-worthy at this point: a black guy and a woman, to show that our hero is really not a conservative stick, but rather a good guy! Very original. Oxford makes sure to reprimand his servant not to get too familiar in public; appearances and all that. But sure, very good guy, very progressive. Aside from this casting, there is no black person and no female role of note. Period-appropriate, sure, but you can't have your cake and eat it at the same moment. 

 

Then we have the whole story about Oxford's son. It's very familiar: young hotshot wants to join to prove his manhood, disparages his wiser father as a coward, realizes that no, really, war is bad, and dies for his troubles. Fine, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, when they go on their secret mission to kill Rasputin (which is the one sequence really standing out in the movie; if the whole thing was like that, it would be much, much better) and succeed, Oxford is very sad because he broke his vow for a second before immediately and in the same fucking scene turning to his son, smile and tell him that he is now a real man. The cognitive dissonance of this is hard to convey into words. 

 

It gets even worse after the death of said son, whose own conversion is so rapid and hastily constructed that it borders on parody. Oxford grows a beard and drinks a lot, the closest men in movies get to showing real human emotions, and then the king visits and tells him that Russia is in revolution now thanks to Lenin and that the bad situation may lead to the same thing in Britain - the end of the monarchy, which Oxford solemnly concurs would be the end of everything. When the king then awards the dead son the Victoria Cross, an honor Oxford himself half an hour earlier disparaged as empty and one he'd rather not have earned, he sobers up and decides to kill people for peace. 

 

While we're at the subject of monarchies, the movie also has the very unfortunate tendency to show the monarchs as being synonymous with their governments. Wilhelm was not the one with power over military strategy and foreign policy, his government was. George of Britain was a constitutional monarch. The only one who had actual power was Nicholas, and he is shown as the puppet of Rasputin. This trope comes at its most ridiculous when Wilson decides to take the US into war ("Get me the generals, we're going to war!" he shouts). Don't you want to, you now, ask Congress? 

 

The movie has an impossible task, to be sure. Like with James Bond, you cannot make a movie in which the main character is pledged to defend the crown and at the same time ignore what this means - until of course, you put it in an alternate fantasy universe, like Kingsman and so many Bond movies do. But in the moment you have a British noble fighting for the continuation of a stratified aristocratic society, you can't pretend this isn't political. This movie does, though. And it falls apart from the very start. 

 

There are ways out of this. It could have embraced its more serious tone and really challenged the idea of fighting for imperialism, essentially becoming a running commentary on Bond. Or it could have embraced the silliness of its premise and go all in on the bullshit, but without trying to be serious. In attempting to square the circle, if falls flat on its ass.