A game Ralph Fiennes keeps things engaging, yet The King’s Man falters due to director Matthew Vaughn’s odd and adolescent approach to action comedy.

Imagine a feature length film of Drunk History where everyone was high on cocaine, and you might understand The King’s Man experience: entertaining in patches, ridiculous in storytelling, and not at all good for you.

In many ways The King’s Man represents the negative legacy which Quentin Tarantino created with Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, with filmmakers all too comfortable rewriting history for their own adolescent retroactive fantasies, in which they expose their own perversions and ideologies especially regarding sex and violence.

Case in point is filmmaker Matthew Vaughn, with The King’s Man a particular odd duck of a film. A prequel to 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, this 1914 set film stars Ralph Fiennes as Orlando Oxford, a British lord who uses his resources and connections to try and stop a scheming Scottish madman from descending the world into chaos.

With WWI the backdrop and notorious political figures such as Grigori Rasputin, Erik Jan Hanussen, Mata Hari key characters in The King’s Man, Vaughn is clearly having fun rewriting history with the immature enthusiasm of a flunking history major half-way through a bag of edibles.

An example of this is the characterisation of Rasputin, the Russian “Mad Monk” who, history has it, had the Emperor of Russia in his grasp. Yet as portrayed by Rhys Ifans, Rasputin is a sex-crazed maniac with a strong preference for boys who wields almost supernatural power.

Of course, it is all based on myth, yet the sight of Ifans seductively licking Fiennes’ leg brings about all matter of queasy WTF reaction. It's a creative decision that is typical of Vaughn who loves to push boundaries, even at the detriment of his own movies.

The action scenes in The King’s Man are a highlight: fun, visible, impactful, in not a little too stylised for their own good. Fiennes is clearly having fun playing an action man role, and the period production and costumes are well designed.

In the end what lingers from The King’s Man is the weird creative decisions that Vaughn employs, a clear weakness from a filmmaker whose films are often less the sum of their parts.