WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The King's Man, now playing in theaters.
As a postmodern exploration of British espionage adventures, the Kingsman franchise has included plenty of references and knowing winks to the James Bond film series, right down to Pierce Brosnan appearing in the original comic book series by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. This distinction has carried over to Kingsman's cinematic adaptations, helmed by filmmaker Matthew Vaughn, including its new prequel film, The King's Man. And despite The King's Man taking place throughout World War I, the film manages to include two direct allusions to the classic Roger Moore era of Bond movies in prequel's explosive finale.
The King's Man features an international cabal of notorious historical figures secretly manipulating the European powers to devastatingly collide with one another into World War I, not unlike a plot by Bond mainstay villains Spectre if their various plots for global turmoil had succeeded. This cabal is headed by a bald leader known simply as The Shepherd, with the shadowy mastermind so cunning he would make Ernst Stavro Blofled jealous. By the end of the prequel, Kingsman's eventual founder Orlando, the Duke of Oxford, learns that this cabal is based off of a flat-topped mountain in the Swiss Alps, leading his allies to bring down this manipulative shadow organization for good. And as Orlando launches his grand plan, the allusions to Moore's Bond era truly become evident.
With one guarded lift as the only discernible means to access The Shepherd's mountainous headquarters, Orlando decides to fly his biplane over it and parachute upon its summit. This plan backfires, however, with Orlando's chute sending him careening into the side of the mountain where he has to improvise climbing gear to ascend the mountain himself. This development echoes one of the longer set pieces in Moore's 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only, with Bond having to similarly climb a perilous mountain in Greece as the only lift to the precipice is heavily guarded. Some of these visual cues from the 1981 film are subtly homaged in The King's Man.
The second major nod to Moore's Bond movies comes when Orlando finally faces The Shepherd at the summit of the mountain in a fierce duel that results in the villain literally clinging for dear life as he grasps Orlando's scarf while dangling from the top of his mountainous hideaway. With one final quip, Orlando severs the scarf in a single, quick motion, sending The Shepherd plummeting to his doom. In Moore's 1977 Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, a villain grabbed 007's necktie to prevent himself from falling to his death after fighting Bond on a Cairo rooftop. After getting the information he required from his opponent, Moore's Bond similarly knocks his tie out of the villain's grasp, letting him fall to his untimely end on the streets below.
The Kingsman films have always worn their numerous influences on their sleeve, and The King's Man is certainly no different in this regard. With James Bond being the most ubiquitous spy in British cinema, Vaughn pays subtle homage to the cinematic adventures of the venerable secret agent in his World War I prequel. And with his stylistic flair, Vaughn has taken two memorable moments from Moore's tenure as the iconic secret agent and lovingly retrofitted them into The King's Man as Orlando exhibits the same death-defying derring-do that has made both the Bond and Kingsman franchises such crowd-pleasing successes.
To see how the newest Kingman film honors James Bond, The King's Man is in theaters now.