In particular I'm referring to the sequence on the frontlines of World War One. Major spoilers below!
For most of the film Conrad has been portrayed as the protagonist. He's the outsider into Orlando/the Duke of Oxford's world of international espionage, the viewer's POV to learn about this world. While Orlando is portrayed as an experienced man whose already finished growing and remains static for the first half of the film, Conrad is still learning and trying to assert himself against his father's attempts to keep him safe. All classic protagonist stuff. And around half way through the movie Conrad finally achieves his goal of getting to the front lines.
In his first real battle Conrad goes into no man's land with a group of "volunteered" soldiers and a commander, they encounter a squad of Germans. The British troops all have visible faces, and have had a brief moment in the trenches when we see they're volunteered unwillingly for this mission to humanise them. The Germans are all covering their faces, some are wearing some quite sinister looking gas masks. This sets up a clear dichotomy: The English are the good guys, the Germans are faceless mooks who exist to be overcome by the heroes; as an audience will default to from previous WW1 films like Wonder Woman.
But then we are given a small moment to humanise the Germans when the two commanders pause to negociate that there will be no guns (it would alert both trenches and guarantee no survivors on either side) showing then the Germans are reasonable too. This small moment sets the stage for a huge moment, Conrad defeats his opponent and has a knife to his throat. At which point the German removes his mask revealing a young man, barely more than a kid, who begs for his life. After some hesitation Conrad sees that his side is loosing and needs his help, so he kills the German
When Conrad returns to his trench a hero an earlier lie he used to get to the front line catches up to him, he's almost able to diffuse the situation but then he's shot by his own side. While Conrad's killing can at least be said to be useful to the war effort his death, the "protagonist's death", was almost random and entirely pointless. While his death is foreshadowed in the previous Kingsman films, it's still a complete subversion of expectations that amounts to a powerful anti war message.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/swj673/the_kings_man_is_an_example_of_subverting/
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