The King’s Daughter will premiere in theaters nationwide on Jan. 21, 2022.
Not all movies have a smooth path from filming to eventual release, but that certainly doesn’t have to doom the final product. Unfortunately, though, that may have been the case of The King’s Daughter, whose production woes kept it unseen to audiences for eight years. And perhaps it should’ve stayed that way, since what we got is indeed a bad movie.
Based on Nebula Award-winning book The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N. McIntyre, the novel and the film are both set in the court of the Sun King, King Louis XIV, focusing on the young heroine, Marie-Josèphe. In the book, she’s an artist and lady-in-waiting who peripherally exists in the king’s orbit. In The King’s Daughter, her agency is dumbed down as Marie-Josèphe (Kaya Scodelario) is revealed in a flowery voiceover narration by Julie Andrews to be the secret daughter of the king (Pierce Brosnan). She’s kept in a strict nunnery until she is of marrying age, when she’s then summoned by the king to Versailles to write music for his courtly amusement, and likely be leveraged for money in some well-appointed marriage.
If the story was just allowed to focus on Marie-Josèphe’s transition into court, and her adventures there told from her point of view, a sweet movie appealing to tweens and teens might have carried through on Scodelario’s charm. But director Sean McNamara instead spends many a scene with Brosnan’s king and his Jesuit confessor and confidante, Père La Chaise (William Hurt) as they discuss sin, God’s will, debt governance, and the king’s propensity for thoughtless affairs. You know, all the topics young girls and kids watching for the adventure are more than happy to sit rapturously through.
And then it really gets strange when the king’s obsession with immortality — so he can rule France in perpetuity — prompts his court physician, Dr. Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber), to send out skilled sailors and fishermen to find a fabled mer-woman. Her supposed powers, once consumed by the king, will achieve his goal of everlasting life. Lucky for him, Captain Yves De La Croix (Benjamin Walker) snags one in a net and brings her back so the king can take her power in an imminent eclipse.
Maybe a more coherent and focused film existed at some point in its post-production life, but the screenplay as is, by Barry Berman and James Schamus, unfolds like it was butchered within an inch of its life. Everything is about plot because no one is given any breathing room in any scene to connect on an emotional level. Scodelario and Walker try to sell a tepid and tame romance but they don’t get much real estate in which to do so. However, there are some lame attempts to have father and daughter connect, which gets a bit creepy during a dance scene. But even that is undercut by Brosnan’s volatile performance that sometimes leans dastardly, and then towards heartfelt, which makes his machinations just confusing and hollow emotionally.
The whole production also reeks of budget constraints, leading to bizarre choices in portraying the period. For instance, it’s set in France but everyone speaks with a British accent, with nary a whiff of any actor attempting even a bad French accent. But the exteriors are clearly shot on location at Versailles in France. Then they hired maybe a dozen extras to fill those expansive locations, which looks paltry onscreen, especially so when they’re all dressed in weirdly anachronistic outfits that seem like they were raided from an ‘80s Duran Duran video. Interiors only fare better when shot inside real mansions. But the built sets, especially the dungeon pool for the captured mer-woman, look like a poor man’s Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride at Disneyland, with a drippy-looking water wheel and a rickety bridge for staged action scenes.
Trying to make “magic” on the cheap hurts The King’s Daughter most when it comes to the mer-woman. She’s hidden for a lot of the film in the murky depths of that pool, but when Marie-Josèphe discovers the creature via her songs, we finally get to see more of her, and it’s not good. The CGI design is wonky, with strange features that are nowhere near beautiful. Plus, she’s not allowed to speak, which means her character progression is defined by swimming fast and occasional squawks. Scodelario is left with all of the heavy lifting of giving the fantasy character any kind of agency, and it's a thankless job.
The results are a film that plays like the outcome was determined by committee vote. Give Brosnan and Hurt more screen time! Cut out all the fun! Add an expensive needle drop from Sia for the credits because that will make it all better! Give me the movie about how The King’s Daughter ended up like this; that’s surely a better story all around.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3FQxwR2
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