[FILM]
THE KING’S MAN
War hero? Conrad (Harris Dickinson) helps a fellow soldier.
★★★
DIRECTOR Matthew Vaughn
OUT 26 DECEMBER CERT TBC / 131 MINS
CAST Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Daniel Brühl
PLOT World War I is about to break out. After the loss of his wife in a combat-related accident, the Duke of Oxford (Fiennes) has sworn never to be involved in violence again and to keep his only son Conrad (Dickinson) from joining the military. Hoping he can stop the conflict without bloodshed, the Duke heads a secret mission to bring down its mastermind.
A PREQUEL IS generally the lazy option for the third part in a franchise, cobbling together a story of where it all began rather than opting for the more complex task of deciding where it goes next. But Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman origin story certainly can’t be accused of being lazy. It’s imaginative to a fault, crammed with countless ideas — some inspired, some underworked, and quite a few that should have been binned. It makes sense for the Kingsman series, about a group of stiff-upper-lipped secret agents, to have its origins in a time when upper lips were at their stiffest: the 1910s, in the lead-up to World War I. Orlando, Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), is a war hero who can no longer stomach war.