Review: 'The King's Man' tries to stage a thoughtful anti-war drama within a famously violent franchise, with mixed results.

Fans of director Matthew Vaughn’s 2014 spy comedy “Kingsmen: The Secret Service” may get lured into the prequel “The King’s Man” expecting the same manic violence and sharp humor — and walk away disappointed that those qualities only emerge in fits and starts.

Instead, Vaughn and his co-writer Karl Gajdusek have attempted to use the franchise as a Trojan horse, delivering a tenderly rendered father/son drama about a pacifism in the face of wartime evil. It’s a jarring juxtaposition, and one that doesn’t come off as tedious and a bit pompous.

The story centers on Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), an English nobleman working as a diplomat to head off a war looming in Europe in 1914. The impetus for the war, it’s explained, is a longtime rivalry among three royal cousins, all grandchildren of Queen Victoria: King George V of the United Kingdom, Czar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. (In a devilish touch, all three monarchs are played by the same actor, Tom Hollander.)

Lord Oxford is an avowed pacifist, having lost his wife Emily (Alexandra Maria Lara) to a sniper in the Boer War in South Africa in 1902 (shown in the movie’s prologue). Oxford’s vow to his dying wife was to never let their son Conrad see war — which becomes difficult when Conrad (Harris Dickinson) reaches adulthood and wants to do his duty by enlisting in the Royal Army.

In an effort to block Conrad’s plan to go to war, Oxford reveals a secret: He has organized his own intelligence network, deploying his valet Shola (Djimon Hounsou) and maid Polly (Gemma Arterton) to gather information from the servants of world leaders from Moscow to Washington.

Oxford’s expertise leads King George to send Oxford as an emissary to Moscow, to urge Czar Nicholas to stay in the war against the Kaiser’s Germany. To do so, Oxford must counteract the mystical influence of the czar’s chief advisor, the mad monk Rasputin (Rhys Ifans). Oxford’s confrontation with Rasputin, aided by Conrad and Shola, is one of the few bursts of the outlandishly staged action in which the original “Kingsmen” film excelled.

In confronting Rasputin, Oxford starts to piece together a larger conspiracy at work. Vaughn has already let us in on that conspiracy, with a mysterious leader known as Shepherd sending out such well-known minions as Vladimir Lenin and Mata Hari. The ultimate confrontation with Shepherd should be a thrilling capstone, but fizzles into an unremarkable action finale.

It’s intriguing to watch Fiennes, so often cast as an over-the-top bad guy (hello, Voldemort), working here as a genteel, thoughtful hero, a character who struggles to maintain his pacifist ideals as the Great War unravels across Europe. The performance feels out of place in a franchise that made its reputation with exploding heads set to the 1812 Overture (which gets a callback here).

Yes, it feels contradictory for a critic, someone who usually demands movies deliver something fresh and new, to ding a franchise movie that stretches into uncharted territory. Certainly, it’s to Vaughn’s credit for trying a new approach to the franchise’s themes of urbane English figures thwarting attempts at global conquest — especially after the misfire of “Kingsmen: The Golden Circle,” which threw all of the first movie’s sensibility out the window for Americanized mayhem. However noble Vaughn’s intentions with “The King’s Man,” the film itself doesn’t deliver on what it promises, either as an action movie or a wartime drama.

We get a brief glimpse of the Kingsmen Agency in the movie’s final minutes — and a couple of surprising casting choices to set up yet another sequel. That movie, if it gets made, could be what Vaughn was going for all along, and might eventually justify the time and effort he squandered on this one.

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‘The King’s Man’

★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, December 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sequences of strong/bloody violence, language and some sexual material. Running time: 131 minutes.