The world’s greatest tyrants and assassins are waging a war that would wipe out millions. Someone will have to be faster to stop them. Discover the beginnings of the first intelligence agency in The King’s Man: The Beginning.
Director Matthew Vaughn reimagines a parodic but equally bloody World War I

The Kingsman series is a kind of primary cousin of James Bond movies, after a recipe with British secret agents that saves the world from the danger of megalomaniacs of the apocalypse, in the captivating style of director Matthew Vaughn (X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass) and with an intense comic book taste, being a screenplay of the graphic novel Kingsman, created in 2012 by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbon.

Many meters below the London tailor Kingsman is the secret base of the agency of the same name, whose members operate under the code name of the characters in Arthurian legends: Arthur, Galavan, Merlin, etc. The weapons of these knights are disguised in the standard kit of an elegant British gentleman: shoes with a retractable knife, bulletproof suit, GPS hat, augmented reality glasses, umbrella-shield, multifunctional radar clock, as well as a special ring, such as to any respected secret society. To become a Kingsman member, you have to go through an extremely difficult selection process. After the bedroom floods at night and you have to look for an escape, in the final test you are asked to kill the dog you raised during training, and if you pull the trigger, a blind bullet will come out. But you have to learn how to train your feelings and be willing to endure the most sadistic tortures without divulging your identity.

The franchise’s first film, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), announces a muscular parody of spy movies, in which Agent Galawan (Colin Firth) confronts a billionaire tech genius (Samuel L. Jackson) talking about James Bond and analyzing what the clichés would normally dictate them to do or say, to know what actions to avoid. The Secret Service promised an action comedy full of extreme situations, dizzying fights and fireworks, and that delivered. Gradually, however, the franchise became more and more ambitious, taking itself more seriously with the second film, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and now the last, The King’s Man, a prequel set during World War I. which captures the genesis of the Kingsman secret service, offering a punk version of a war in which the fate of millions of people depends on decoding secret messages.

In a way, the parody is still there. Agents work closely with the King of England to end the Great War, encountering flamboyant versions of famous historical figures: for example, Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) is a true Slavic monster, an influential and effeminate monk who microdoses cyanide to immunize himself. poison and dance with swords like a ninja, provoking intense and funny fights.

The film plunges both into the trenches and behind the scenes of the war. A secret cabal summons one of its members, the Serb-Bosnian Gavrilo Princip (Joel Basman), to assassinate Franz Ferdinand (Ron Cook) and the Russian tsar will have to abdicate and cede the land to Lenin (August Diehl) . Tom Hollander appears here in a triple role, playing King George of England, Kaiser Willhelm, as well as Tsar Nicholas, each with his own accent and mustache.
Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) tries to save the fate of Great Britain by involving the USA in the war, but the president Woodrow Wilson (Ian Kelly) does not accept because he is blackmailed with an incriminating sextape spread by Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner). Meanwhile, Orlando tries to stop his son, Conrad (Harris Dickinson), from enlisting in the war, knowing that this is the definition of an absurd death, in which some fight with tanks and artillery and others with swordsmen, but all are willing to give his life for his country. Merlin, who in the first two films is played by Mark Strong, is a kind of Cipher from the Matrix who is sitting on the buttons, now he is a skilled and loyal African fighter from the front line, Shola (Djimon Hounsou).

Matthew Vaughn’s screenplay in collaboration with Karl Gajdusek carries all this intense action, with the iconic twists and turns of the franchise, as in the dream of a teenager who fell asleep in a documentary about World War I, and directed by Vaughn, the fights are choreographed complex, virtuous and sometimes brutal. And if the story and the tragedies don’t appeal to you, at least these fight sequences keep the Kingsman charm alive.

Two more films are set to appear: the fourth, entitled Kingsman: The Blue Blood, followed by a spin-off, Statesman, which seems to focus on the story of the American secret service of the same name in The Golden Circle, composed of cowboys who It helps Kingsman face the danger of a drug queen. An eight-hour Kingsman miniseries is also under development, in addition to the many games that have appeared since the first graphic novel, so the Kingsman universe doesn’t seem to be holding back any time soon.