Review by JPRetana

• Username: JPRetana

The King’s Man is a mostly harmless movie, unless you, like Rasputin, “consider being boring offensive”; if that’s the case, then you’re most likely going to want to demand satisfaction from co-writer/director Matthew Vaughn. This is an exceedingly long movie, yet it somehow can’t or won’t find the time or space to fit in a little logic. Consider the following. A group of British citizens go to Moscow to kill Rasputin, whom they believe to be a pernicious influence on the Tsar – and that he is, but that doesn’t change the fact that Rasputin remains the Tsar’s closest and most trusted advisor. One would not expect the Russian monarch to be too keen on continuing his alliance with England if he knew a bunch of English covert agents just assassinated, with extreme prejudice, his right hand man. Fortunately he never finds out – or at least doesn’t appear to do so; the scene where the British cover up the murder and make it look like an accident or whatever has gone missing, presumably because it was never written, let alone shot. Having said that, I rather liked Rasputin’s death scene, which recreates all manners of his fabled death (or, to be more specific, the myth surrounding it created by Prince Felix Yusupov); poison, beating, bullet wounds, and drowning in freezing water. This, by the way, is not a spoiler; first because it happens halfway through the movie (and in this case “halfway” means there’s still a very long way to go), and second because his legendary demise is so well known it even has a trope named after it. You know what else would not be a spoiler? The identity of the criminal mastermind behind the nameless organization – I would suggest OWCA (Organization Without a Cool Acronym), were it not already taken – intent on wreaking havoc upon the world; identity which I will not reveal because it should be readily apparent to anyone familiar with the Law of Economy of Characters (in which a seemingly minor or unimportant character turns out to be much more crucial to the plot than they first appear to be). I will only add that the villain’s uncanny ability to impossibly go from point A to a point beyond the alphabet, aided by little more than the requirements of the script, produces a plot hole so big a submarine could pass through it – and literally does.