The King's Daughter (2022)

By: Mike Ward on Monday, January 24

PG Running Time: 94 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

A family film opening in theaters usually can draw some attention, and this storybook-like tale of mermaids, immortality, kings and royalty might have the right ingredients for families to enjoy.
Though the King has an off-screen addiction to what appears to be one night stands with people who live in his palace, The King’s Daughter is largely a harmless viewing experience.
We only have the final product as presented, but you wonder what might have been had this project been fully realized.

NO

Shelved for nearly eight years, The King’s Daughter probably shouldn’t even be released at this point. As such, it does not look ready for its closeup.
Four editors got a crack at this thing, some of which after it was pulled from the release schedule. As a result, the storylines are haphazard and a mess, the plot feels chopped and cut within an inch of its life and the film never finds any cohesiveness.
The kind of movie that feels like a B-movie throwaway for a low-grade streaming service.

OUR REVIEW

January movie releases are their own unique kind of animal. They often tend to see the wider release of awards contenders who qualified in New York or Los Angeles for the upcoming awards cycle, or films which are part of a dumping ground that often occurs in January, April and August - the time when studios look to unload projects that they don’t quite know what to do with. The hope is that something might stick and some decent profits can be collected. In the past, this has worked well for some really bad horror films, but occasionally you get other strange releases like The King’s Daughter.

On the surface, there is nothing seemingly outrageous about the film. A family movie told in the days of King Louis XIV, The King’s Daughter takes us into a mythical storybook-like fantasy. The King (Pierce Brosnan) seeks immortality and orders a mermaid stolen from the underwater city of Atlantis. What he doesn’t anticipate is the arrival of his daughter, Marie-Josèphe (Kaya Scodelario), born illegitimate and stowed away at a convent and essentially forgotten. She makes a connection to the proverbial lady in the water and inadvertently gums up the King’s plans.

Narrated by Julie Andrews, this feels like something that might debut on Netflix or maybe a second-tier streaming service. Instead, it is the rare wide release for scrappy studio Gravitas Ventures, who have apparently calculated that people would have grown weary of Spider-Man: No Way Home by now (Ed. Note: they haven’t) and are looking for something new to watch as a family.

So what’s the problem? As it turns out…everything. Deep breathe. Here we go…

The King’s Daughter was shot in 2014 and is just now getting a theatrical release, during a pandemic no less, in January 2022. All of these actors remain alive (I think) but are timestamped into a movie that saw them with much different careers than what they have now. Director Sean McNamara has moved on from projects like this and is now directing several Christmas movies a year for various networks like Lifetime Movies and Hallmark Channel. He currently has 11 films listed in production or pre-production where he is credited as the director, according to IMDb. ELEVEN!!

Notes indicate the film was essentially shot in about a month or so in Versailles. The sets look terrific; well, I mean, the architecture around the actors looks terrific. We also have some location work in Australia before the film was suddenly pulled from the release schedule because more work was needed on visual effects. Along the way, four editors (FOUR!) got a crack at pulling this all together, while several screenwriters did some work, uncredited and behind the scenes. What we get, all these years later, is a movie held together by glue and staples, adapted from the award-winning children’s novel, “The Moon and the Sea” by Vonda N. McIntyre.

In short, the film is a mess. Within the first 10 minutes, so many random ideas and thoughts come our way, we cannot quite make sense of much of anything. Brosnan, with a 1980s rock star wig, plays the King as a narcissist with a heart of gold. He confides in his priest (William Hurt) his nightly sins, but never learns from them. His quest for immortality is entirely self-serving and he knowingly has a daughter he refuses to acknowledge until the priest calls for her arrival. Even the reasons why the priest suddenly summons Marie-Josèphe are confusing because the movie is basically eight years older and four editors got a crack at finishing the final cut.

Is the priest trying to reconcile a broken relationship between father and daughter? Has he brought her to the King’s mansion for her musical ability in playing the cello? Or, and pray with me that this isn’t even partly true, is it to provide work for a Black lady-in-waiting (Crystal Clarke), who only exists in the movie to stand in as a servant to Marie-Josèphe?

No one could truly possibly know the answer. There’s a love interest, Yves (Benjamin Walker), a villainous rogue doctor (Pablo Schreiber), and an odious Frenchman (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) who has been promised Marie-Josèphe’s hand in marriage. If anything, McIntyre’s experience in adapting her novel may be a case study in why authors should give great thought to deciding whether or not to allow their novel to come to life on the big screen.

Scodelario is suited for a role like this, she is just victimized by a screenplay that seems to be not that good in the first place. This film is spliced, cut and chopped to an inch of its life and those visual effects the film was delayed for appear to never have been brought to present day. The look of the mermaid (whose face is that of Fan Bingbing), especially by today’s standards, is rather embarrassing.

A random Sia song from 2015 blasts in near the end. The beautiful Scodelario is supposed to be hideous and mocked by a bunch of other women in and around the King, who dress like they are from the 1980s and sneer and leer like Instagram models who cannot get into Saddle Ranch on a Friday night. The whole thing is just silly and odd and feels like the television movies McNamara now makes in great abundance.

One silver lining: Scodelario met, fell in love, got married, and now has two children with co-star Benjamin Wright. So not all bad I guess?

CAST & CREW

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Kaya Scodelario, William Hurt, Benjamin Walker, Pablo Schreiber, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Rachel Griffiths, Crystal Clarke, Fan Bingbing, Julie Andrews

Director: Sean McNamara
Written by: Barry Berman, James Schamus
Based on the novel “The Moon and the Sun” by Vonda N. McIntyre
Release Date: January 21, 2022
Gravitas Ventures

A family film opening in theaters usually can draw some attention, and this storybook-like tale of mermaids, immortality, kings and royalty might have the right ingredients for families to enjoy.

Though the King has an off-screen addiction to what appears to be one night stands with people who live in his palace, The King’s Daughter is largely a harmless viewing experience.

We only have the final product as presented, but you wonder what might have been had this project been fully realized.

Shelved for nearly eight years, The King’s Daughter probably shouldn’t even be released at this point. As such, it does not look ready for its closeup.

Four editors got a crack at this thing, some of which after it was pulled from the release schedule. As a result, the storylines are haphazard and a mess, the plot feels chopped and cut within an inch of its life and the film never finds any cohesiveness.

The kind of movie that feels like a B-movie throwaway for a low-grade streaming service.