The final trailer for Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman prequel The King’s Man highlights the movie’s motley crew of historical villains. Based on the Mark Millar graphic novel The Secret Service, Vaughn’s original action movie Kingsman was a surprise hit with $414 million at the box office.
Of course in today’s Hollywood any movie that performs as well as Kingsman is bound to spawn not just sequels but a whole expanded universe. Obviously Kingsman did get its sequel in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which also topped the $400 million mark at the worldwide box office. But now it’s also getting a prequel movie, The King’s Man, showing the origins of the Kingsman service depicted in the original films.
Indeed the final trailer for The King’s Man just dropped and the action in the prequel movie looks to be as insane as in the first two Kingsman films. This trailer however focuses less on the good guys and more on the movie’s villains, who happen to all be based on real historical figures (though it’s safe to say some liberties were taken in depicting this particular trio of notorious personages). See the trailer in the space below (via 20th Century Studios):
Being set during World War I it’s appropriate that The King’s Man would cast as its villains a trio of figures who made their infamous names during that time period. First up is Gavrilo Princip (Joel Basman), the Bosnian Serb terrorist who gained eternal fame as the man who lit the fuse on The Great War with the assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand. Next up is Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), the exotic dancer who allegedly became a spy for Germany and was later executed by the French army (and was played on film by Greta Garbo). Last but not least, the film also depicts an (only slightly exaggerated) version of Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), the Siberian mystic who became close to Russian Czar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra only to be later murdered in memorable fashion.
Hardcore history buffs will no doubt object to much of how these three particular figures are depicted in The King’s Man. But Vaughn’s agenda clearly is not to stick to historical fact so much as to start with those facts and then launch off into the kind of over-the-top action he clearly favors. Of course filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino have gotten slammed in the past for playing fast-and-loose with historical fact in their own less-than-accurate films. But ultimately the idea is to have fun with history more than to teach an actual valuable history lesson. The King’s Man will have done its job if it delivers its action movie goods, while those curious about the real history can always head to the library.
Source: 20th Century Studios
- The King's Man (2021)Release date: Dec 22, 2021
