When his wife dies during a Geurilla attack in the Boer War, The Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) vows his young son will never have to endure another war. To this end, along with his butler Shola (Djimon Hounsou) and the family nanny Polly (Gemma Arterton) he forms a spy network trying to influence things.
However another shadowy figure is tugging on those same strings and hoping for the opposite result.
Shenanigans ensue.
Yawn. When the second Kingsman movie was poor I never expected to see a third.
This does retro superspy action around the edges of real events leading up to and during WWI with some alternative history that's broadly in the same direction as actual events but inserts the characters into the path of noteworthy historical figures.
It's not actively bad it's just a bit perfunctory, a bit boring and a bit too long.
Even at this length there's stuff seemingly missing. For example at one point Polly is stuck in a shed with racks of cheese. People shoot the cheese and she gets splattered with it. Then we barely see her again until the end of the movie. The cheese can't have been there just for verisimilitude it cost time and money to set that up in excess of it just being a shed sans cheese. It is Chekhov's Cheese yet it never goes off. What gag or scene got dropped? There's masses of stuff with trench warfare that's reasonably well done but sort of goes nowhere (apart from one twist that surprised me) that could have been done in half the time.
It's like they shot a fuckton of movie then smashed something together from it and still had too much. Obviously almost all big movies will have unused stuff from various rewrites and maybe reshoots but this feels like a lot's been shuffled about. It also had a similar vibe to Argylle the more recent Matthew Vaughn movie, very set-piecey and not really flowing. The villain is almost comically hidden in mystery then reveals himself and it's a damp squib.
Very unchallenging moving wallpaper 4/10, yawn.