131 min | R | December 22, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
A pacifist duke builds a secret spy network while the First World War grinds his world to mud. Rasputin dances, a villain’s cabal schemes, and Ralph Fiennes grieves in the middle of it all. The prestige war drama and the cartoon spy romp keep tripping over each other.
The film is a prequel to the Kingsman franchise that reaches backward into the founding of the spy agency against the carnage of the First World War. Ralph Fiennes plays Orlando, the Duke of Oxford, a pacifist aristocrat who builds a private intelligence network of servants while trying to keep his son off the battlefield. A secret cabal of historical villains pulls the strings behind the war. The movie wants to be a sober meditation on grief and the cost of empire and a cartoon about killer monks in the same breath. It never decides which film it is making, and the seams show in every scene.
Ralph Fiennes commits fully to Orlando and gives the film a center of gravity it does not deserve. He plays the duke as a grieving man whose pacifism curdles into helplessness, and his restraint anchors the noise around him. Rhys Ifans plays Grigori Rasputin as a leering, dancing grotesque who fights like a ballet dancer with a knife. The Rasputin set piece is the only sequence where the film’s tonal recklessness becomes a virtue. Harris Dickinson plays Conrad, the son desperate to enlist, with earnest conviction that the script keeps undercutting. Gemma Arterton and Djimon Hounsou play Polly and Shola as competent operatives the movie barely bothers to develop.
Matthew Vaughn directs from a script he wrote with Karl Gajdusek, and the whiplash between registers is a choice rather than an accident. He shoots a no man’s land crossing with handheld immediacy that borrows the grammar of war pictures, then cuts to a villain’s lair built like a Bond set. The editing slams these modes together without transition, so a scene of genuine trench horror sits beside a swordfight scored for laughs. Vaughn keeps the franchise’s whip-pan camera tricks and speed-ramped fight choreography intact. They look ridiculous bolted onto a story that keeps asking the audience to mourn.
The result is a movie at war with its own ambitions. Vaughn wants the prestige of a WWI drama and the candy of a spy spoof, and he refuses to sacrifice either. Fiennes nearly holds the contradiction together through sheer conviction. The script will not let him, because every time the film earns a real emotion it reaches for a joke or a stunt to undercut it. This is an origin story that mistakes a pile of tones for a point of view.