Feast Your Eyes On The Very English Badassery Of The ‘Kingsman’ Prequel Trailer
Colin Firth and Taron Egerton have been replaced by Ralph Fiennes and, uh Rasputin.
Up till now, the premise of the Kingsman series has been very simple: what if you ratcheted up the gore, sex and Britishness of the James Bond series to hitherto unseen levels?
The first film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, was an unexpected smash hit, proving that there really is an audience for films that end on a gag about anal sex. But the sequel, The Golden Circle, was somewhat less popular — critics were uncomfortable with an extended setpiece involving uh, naughty bits, and audiences showed up in far fewer numbers.
The formula was clearly at least a slightly bit broken, and so director Matthew Vaughn has fixed it, restarting the whole franchise with a new prequel cleverly titled The King’s Man.
Of course, any franchise restarter will come with a few sacrifices. In this case, those sacrifices mainly involve the cast — given that The King’s Man is set in the midst of the First World War, Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is aggressively too not-born to appear, while it’s safe to assume that Harry Hart (Colin Firth) will show up, at best, in a limited role.
That means that the table has been reset, and a new cast of dapper spies have been assembled, led by the very British Ralph Fiennes as The Duke of Oxford and up-and-comer Harris Dickinson as new protege Conrad, along with Gemma Arterton, Stanley Tucci, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Charles “The Catering Was Nice” Dance.
Although the plot has been kept under very tight wraps, the trailer does give some clues as to the direction of the series, starting on the horror of a WW1 battlefield, moving through shots of a very insidious looking Rasputin (our villain, probably?) and culminating on a glimpse at a Kingsman staple — the iconic tailor shop.
Watch the whole thing below, and then get ready for the film to drop on Valentine’s Day, 2020: