The King’s Daughter

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-

               Oh, January. What cinematic treasure you bring me every year.

               It’s not uncommon for a film to have a troubled path to the screen, either getting stuck in a prolonged development or production phase or even being completed and stuck on a shelf for awhile before finally being released. However, The King’s Daughter may have set some sort of record in this arena. Based on the 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun, the film was first put into development in 1999 as a project for The Jim Henson Company. That didn’t go anywhere and the project move to Disney in 2001. Disney ultimately didn’t do anything with it either. The project then made its way to Paramount, who finally made the film…..in 2014. That’s right, not a typo. This movie was made eight fucking years ago. Paramount dropped the movie only three weeks from its planned release date in 2015 and it has sat on a shelf ever since. But now, finally, Gravitas Ventures (who released the Jackie Chan flick Vanguard in 2020) is showing their business savvy by picking up an eight-year-old production and releasing it into 2,100 theaters without spending a dime on advertising. January is often considered a dumping ground for studios to quietly release films that they have no confidence in, but I can’t think of a film that was considered more disposable by the people that financed it.

               Pierce Brosnan for some reason stars as King Louis XIV, who becomes aware of his own mortality after a failed assassination attempt and, logically, decides to send his men to Atlantis (?!) to capture a mermaid (?!?!) in order to achieve immortality (?!?!?!). I don’t know much about mermaid mythology, so somebody please let me know if anything about that last sentence makes any fucking sense. Meanwhile (and they actually say “meanwhile”), the King has found his illegitimate daughter (played by Kayla Scodelario) and has her brought to the palace so that she can play music every morning that serves as his alarm clock. She supposedly develops a friendship with the imprisoned mermaid, even though the movie does nothing to establish this friendship, and becomes determined to help the mermaid escape the castle.

               It’s not hard to see why Paramount spent $40 million on this movie, watched the result and then shrugged their shoulders before tossing it into a vault. What is hard to see is what exactly that $40 million was spent on. When creating a high-concept blend of fantasy and historical fiction, you might think that you wouldn’t hire a director known entirely for Hallmark movies and direct-to-video sequels to Baby Geniuses. You would be wrong, though, and director Sean McNamara delivers exactly what his resume would suggest. The King’s Daughter, despite it’s A-list cast, looks and feels like a cheap made-for-television production. The lighting is over-saturated in a way that evokes daytime soap operas, the mermaid looks liked it was lifted from a screensaver and the sets look like rejected prototypes for Pirates of the Caribbean. I don’t mean the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, I mean the frigging theme park attraction. What’s most striking is that this movie somehow got permission to film scenes at the real Palace of Versailles, which makes for quite a contrast between scenes shot in one of the most beautiful buildings in the world and scenes shot on sets that look like they were constructed for a high school play.

               As I indicated earlier, I’m not really sure that I followed the plot either. How and why can mermaids grant immortality? Why are they in Atlantis, or at least what I think is Atlantis? Why does everyone know where Atlantis is? The trip to Atlantis to capture a mermaid literally takes about three minutes of screentime, as if it’s as routine as going for a cup of coffee. If it’s so easy to get one, why not just go get another one if it escapes? Why does the movie not bother to establish any relationship between the mermaid and the King’s daughter, yet expect us to be invested in their supposedly deep bond? These are all questions that I pondered as I sat alone in a theater watching a PG movie about mermaids. It was quite an existential moment.

               I like to think that the actors were shocked to see that this movie was finally in theaters and they had to dig deep into their memory banks before thinking “oh right, that mermaid thing.” Pierce Brosnan steals the show and is the only one that seems to be having fun on his way to cashing his paycheck for this thing. He doesn’t just chew scenery, he devours it as he prances around as King Louis XIV and makes every gesture as over-the-top as he can. Kayla Scodelario has become one of the most prominent young actresses on the scene today, so it’s odd to see her here, in a supposedly new movie, and she is as young as she was when I first saw her in The Maze Runner. Scodelario hasn’t been blessed with the strongest of material in her career, but she tries her damndest here. The film does little to establish her character or her relationships, so it is a credit to her that she manages to evoke some empathy for a character that’s as deep as a sheet of paper. William Hurt is also in this and he seems as confused by that fact as I am.

               The King’s Daughter would be passable as a straight-to-video/streaming movie for kids, but I’m baffled that this is a nationwide theatrical release with actuals stars in it. I can’t say that it made me angry or even bored, but it feels like a cheap television production that glosses over major plot points not as an artistic choice, but as a budgetary limitation. I can’t give it a failing grade, though because it gave me James Bond playing King Louis XIV and I never even realized that I needed that in my life.

Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King%27s_Daughter_(2022_film)#/media/File:The_King’s_Daughter_(2022_film).jpg