The King's Man sets the clock back on Matthew Vaughn's cinematic spy franchise, bringing audiences to the roots of the intelligence organization in World War I. It's also a movie rife with historical inaccuracies, including that the French were excised from the proceedings, Grigori Rasputin had otherworldly powers and the entire conflict was masterminded by a clandestine terrorist organization a la James Bond's SPECTRE.
However, one of the things the movie gets right is the interconnected nature of Europe's monarchs. King George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tzar Nicholas II of Russia were all grandsons of Queen Victoria, making them all cousins. And The King's Man leans into this odd quirk of history, emphasizing the similarities between the three by having all of them played by the same actor, Tom Hollander. In doing so, the film is able to underline its ethos on the futility and meaninglessness of the Great War.
Hollander's depictions of the three monarchs are disparaging, to say the least. Wilhelm is an egotistical troublemaker, largely motivated by his insecurities over his deformed left hand, while Nicholas is an equally petty imbecile, disparaging of his cousins and easily manipulated by Rasputin's scheming. These characterizations are broad oversimplifications, but not too far from the truth of history. Unsurprisingly, George largely escapes ridicule in The King's Man, which paints him as a level-headed pacifist who tries to prevent the outbreak of war by appealing to his cousins' family history, but to no avail.
What Hollander's casting accomplishes, besides giving the actor a chance to show off his impressive range of accents, is underscoring the film's message. Despite its impressively-directed action scenes, The King's Man is a movie that sees little glory or righteousness in World War I. The entire conflict is depicted as the petty squabbling of overgrown spoiled children that bloomed into a devastating event that cost the lives of over 14 million people and scarred the continent of Europe forever. Casting the same actor to play all three leaders emphasizes the inherent similarities of the conflicting empires and how empty and ignoble the entire war truly was.
It's a shame that the movie undercuts its own message by the end. The King's Man is vocally anti-imperialist, with its protagonist -- Orlando, Duke of Oxford -- being a British Army veteran who grew tired of killing foreigners in the name of Queen and Country. Orlando then devotes his life to pacifism, an ethos that ultimately led him to form the Kingsmen secret intelligence service to keep the peace throughout the world.
However, if that's the case, then the Kingsmen are terrible at their jobs since the remainder of the 20th Century is rife with wars that they seemingly failed to prevent. Even the movie's ending seems to acknowledge this; in a mid-credits scene, viewers see that the Flock (the aforementioned clandestine group) is still active, with German advisor Erik Jan Hanussen and Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin plotting their next move. Hanussen introduces Lenin to the man who personally killed the Romanovs and the Flock's newest member: a mustachioed young German named Adolf Hitler.
Still, even with its fumbling at the end, Vaughn and the team behind The King's Man are able to use the language of cinema to get their anti-war message across. World War II is lionized in our collective memories because Hitler and the Nazi party made for such contemptible villains that needed to be stopped. By contrast, World War I doesn't really have "good guys" or "bad guys," just the narrow-minded machinations of monarchs trying their best to delay the last days of their empires, sending millions to die in the process.
To see how the movie's best movie is casting Hollander in multiple roles, The King's Man is available to stream on HBO Max and Hulu.