The Princess fumbles Joey King’s coronation as an action star
Director Le-Van Kiet delivers a forgettable film whose single distinguishing characteristic is a total lack of distinguishing characteristics
Film Reviews Joey King
A yawningly simplistic and roundly inconsequential action movie, The Princess lacks, on a narrative level, the certitude and clarity of purpose of its title character. Devoid of any attendant sense of even manufactured adventure, the result is something that is neither fish nor fowl—too generic for most genre fans, and too violent for preadolescents seeking some modicum of rah-rah uplift in this story of a young woman protecting her kingdom at the blade of a sword.
Directed by Le-Van Kiet, the film opens with an imprisoned, handcuffed princess (Joey King) defeating some henchmen sent to fetch her. The evil Julius (Dominic Cooper, trading in empty sneering), assisted by Moira (Olga Kurylenko), has kidnapped her parents, the King (Ed Stoppard) and Queen (Alex Reid), as well as her 11-year-old sister Violet (Katelyn Rose Downey), in an effort to force the princess to acquiesce to marriage, thereby consolidating his takeover of power.
Flashbacks show the princess leaving Julius humiliated at the altar, and also training with Linh (Veronica Ngô), an ally and friend of her parents. After she escapes and initially hides, the princess fights a lot of marauding mercenaries, even teaming up with Linh for a moment. In its third act, the movie feints a pivot in which Julius hatches an alternate plan to just wed Violet, but quickly discards the darker implications of this twist for a return to more conventional plotting.
There are signs early on that The Princess, written by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton, lacks some of the resources to bring their grand vision to life. In one shot, as a group of men labor to drop an ostensibly heavy wooden beam that would effectively seal a gate, the accompanying sound effect comes across as a knock on a hollow table. Several scenes later comes a moment which may represent the worst CGI fire ever put on screen. In between, and after, are sequences in which gathering attackers yell or growl nonsensically, as if the movie has exhausted its allowance of stunt performer dialogue.
None of these bits, it should be stressed, are enough, individually or in aggregate, to raise the movie to the status of “interestingly bad.” Rather, they are simply indicators of daily shortfalls, cut corners, and compromises which render the film unsuccessful.
Zooming out from the production itself, it’s somewhat difficult to understand The Princess’ history as a spec script sale, especially since its single most distinguishing characteristic is a total lack of distinguishing characteristics. The tale of a princess called or pushed to action in defense of her younger sister might be interesting, and even carry with it some additionally heightened emotional punching power in a post-Roe world. But the screenplay’s treatment of that aspect is perfunctory; its subject is a headstrong, capable and independent young woman who merely happens to have a younger sibling. There’s no nuance or depth to the relationship between Violet and her sister.
Meanwhile, if Moira initially seems to fall in line with the tradition of witchy, king-whispering second-in-commands secretly pining for or accruing power for themselves, the movie abandons even that trope, instead rendering the character merely a physical enforcer with a slightly more notable weapon of choice (a barbed whip). Even a moment of heavy-handed political messaging in its first 10 minutes (“You have welcomed outsiders—you should have conquered them!,” Julius scolds the King, as the camera cuts away to a small group of pitiable, differently colored refugees) falls away, so allergic is The Princess to any type of specificity.
This leaves viewers with… just a lot of action. Like, lots of action—all of it very familiar, and most of it staged with little imagination. To dwell too much on its largely unmotivated nature could risk coming off as a genre-hater. But it’s worth pointing out that there isn’t really much story here, other than to go “get” the princess—who, again, has already been detained. Does the wedding need to actually take place within a certain time period, or be witnessed by specific parties? Who precisely is mollified by a forced marriage? A viewer never really knows.
The princess, understandably, loathes Julius. But her opposition isn’t rooted in arguments about love or attraction, but women being able to serve as royal heir. Still, what does a “win” look like for the princess, and what is the plan to achieve that, apart from simply killing hundreds of people seeking to help enforce Julius’ wedding wish?
To be clear, if it’s just the latter, that’s fine too. But The Princess never really articulates that seat-of-the-pants survival. It is a series of scenes in search of a story. And in the absence of a more restrictive and rigorously defined setting, which could have hypothetically borrowed part of the appeal of something like The Raid (or at least given the movie a structurally sturdy, video game board-clearing feeling), The Princess basically just serves up a never-ending assembly line of goons who are bad at their job. At one point the princess gets captured, but then escapes, so that the vaguely defined mayhem recommences.
King, who first gained recognition as a child actor in 2010’s Ramona and Beezus, and then proved herself a capable young performer in 2019’s The Act, struggles here to deliver a fully dimensional character. She’s not done many favors with the material, true. But she neither communicates steely, sophisticated resolve, nor credibly delivers as an action heroine. The movie instead relies on editing and manipulated frames-per-second sleight-of-hand (never quite slow-motion, never quite hyperkinetic) to sell its physical confrontations.
Overall, The Princess is forgettable—just another number in a library of entertainment assets, the type of thing executives refer to as content or programming on shareholder calls. There is no glory for anyone involved here, nor any enjoyable, diversionary escape for a viewer.
69 Comments
I haven’t seen this yet so I don’t know if I agree with the review, but the signs were very much there from the trailer. At the point where Joey King goes from coddled princess to action star, “Bad Reputation” starts up, the most rote, generic and overused song they could have possibly chosen.
Yup!
I am so mad at fucking Rousey for using that AMAZING song by the DELIGHTFUL Joan Jett as her entrance music. God I hate Rousey.
I should clarify by the way that I don’t dislike the song, far from it.It’s just overused and obvious – see also Sabotage, Fortunate Son and White Rabbit. Great songs all but maybe leave them out of films and trailers, eh?
Oh man, “I Can See Clearly Now”. Grosse Pointe Blank is the last time I was okay with it in a movie.ETA: Oh, and Supernatural spoiled Wayward Son for me. They used it to good effect but used it too many times and I can’t hear it without thinking of that show.
I don’t have much opinion on Joey King one way or the other but looking at her filmography, holy shit is it filled with bad movies and this one looks no different. Maybe the upcoming Bullet Train will finally be a winner.
She was good on Fargo, but I watched a couple of those Kissing Booth movies (don’t ask) and holy shit is she terrible. I mean, of course the scripts and direction are terrible too, but she comes off as one of the worst actors even among all the people clearly just cast for their looks. She’s so incredibly bad and is given so much screen-time that they almost seem like a vanity project put together by her family ala the movie of Dear Evan Hansen or her significant other ala Pia Zadora in Butterfly or those old Roger Vadim movies.
Those movies were saved by their message: Your loser friends are stepping stones on your way to popularity, and if you’re beautiful enough they’ll come crawling back no matter how many times you throw them under the bus to get the hot jock.Oh, wait…
I’ll defend White House Down, it’s like the right kind of stupid.
I will watch it to spite this review. Joey King commits, damnit!
Sounds a lot like the recent Netflix film Interceptor, except without even Matthew Reilly’s gleefully go-for-broke writing style to prop up the nonexistent story.
Monday: The Princess is one of the 15 best movies coming to Hulu in July.Friday: The Princess is a D.
“15 best” does not imply that all (or even any) are ‘good’.
Also true of Barsanti posts.
Fair
Oh, please.If you announce “15 best” the tacit implication is that they are, at the very least (and I’m being generous here), above average.If a movie is shit, you leave it off the list and make it the “14 best”.
Why bother us with shit then, could have been 10 movies
You can show more ads in a longer list. Duh.
Sounds like the take could be that Hulu didn’t get many good movies in July.
Yet we get 15
Shillers gotta shill.
“Somebody wants us to shill.”“Never. We’re above that.”“It’s the guy who directed The Requin.”“Tell him it’ll be up Monday.”
I thought it was him! Such a waste. “Dust of Life” was brilliant. But he’s been reduced to directing schlock. First The Requin and now this.
License to shill?
What a week!
15 movies is a lot to release in one month.
I think The Princess was the only Hulu original on that list. The only other 2022 movie was the Bob’s Burgers movie. Everything else on the list was at least a decade old.
Well, it’s no Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, if that’s what you’re getting at.
Did they get her sword at a Spirit Halloween store?
Lmfao, you’re not kidding. I had to go back and look after I read you comment. It looks so fake.
She likes her sword blades dull and rounded.
That butter is not gonna spread itself on that giant bread…..
She prefers her adversaries die over the course of several weeks from a nasty infection.
like the cast!
Like the script?
I’d be more worried about getting jabbed by her elbow from her bizarre fighting stance.
She’s like the Alan Rickman character in Robin Hood — the one who wanted to cut out Robin’s heart with a spoon because it would hurt more than with a knife.
“You changed it…to…Latrine?”
Oh thank the kitteny christ someone else noticed that the sword looks like a prop from Power Rangers!
Be nice! That is clearly fine Detroit car bumper steel forged by the finest Ren fair blacksmith in all of the kingdom of Tri-state
Came down here to say the same thing. That’s the fakest sword I’ve ever seen in a movie. It makes the baby in American Sniper look real in comparison.
One running joke in the film is our heroine’s inability to keep hold of a sword. They probably eventually ran out of convincing props.
Both of those promo images. I know props and safety are important, but that just looked embarassing.
“The Princess Fumbles” is a pretty good title.
No. It is not.
Unsurprising, the trailer was utterly horrible.
Joeeeeeeey! Joey Bag ‘o Princess!
Settle down, Taz.
D’you, er, d’you do a lot of dropping wooden beams to know what a wooden beam sounds like when it’s dropped, Brenty-kins? No? Ooooh.
I’m kinda curious now to read the script. Because I’ve been a story analyst for over a decade now and yeah, specs are by and large pretty bad, or at least pretty dull. So there must have been SOMETHING in it to get someone’s attention and subsequently their money. Given what you say in the review, which is that there’s a LOT of action, I wonder if the action scenes in the spec were written with expository character/plot development cues that made those scenes seem more interesting/exciting/necessary. (For the uninitiated, action scenes in scripts are often summarized into the necessary action beats because it’s a lot of wasted space and kind of annoying to actually choreograph in a script. So a 5 minute hand-to-hand fight might just be one paragraph of description along the lines of “They have a back-and-forth fist fight, neither party gaining a clear advantage until Character X notices Character Y bleeding from a bullet wound in the shoulder. Character X then begins hammering on the wound, leading to Character Y buckling under the pain and begging for mercy.”)
Or are many of the people praising a screenplay just pretending they read the whole thing, when they only skimmed the 3 page treatment?
so not much of a coronation
I heard about this movie and honestly thought it was one of those ones that would go straight to my library’s streaming service, Red Box, and in a year be a “big get” for something like Fawesome.
So what do you call this sword fighting style where you keep your other elbow extended? Doesn’t seem very practical.
It’s a very obscure sword fighting technique in which you awkwardly expose your unarmored side towards your opponent to bait them into lopping off your arm at the elbow. Only joke’s on them, because that’s not the one holding the sword! That’s when you strike with your butter knife sword.Obviously, it’s an obscure technique since you can only try it once but apparently she has a 100% success rate in The Princess. Must be working for her!
Joey Style.
Ramona has a rough day.
Yeah that’s pretty much exactly the review I would have expected for this movie if I had ever heard of it before today.
I’m wildly curious as to why this incredibly generic-sounding movie ever got made. Like, what was is that attracted attention?
Yeah, this looks like the kind of movie that gets made because some dad wants to help his unknown daughter make it as an actress and is willing to put up $$$ to make it happen.
“Sir, our statisticians have determined this script contains all the most-watched, and therefore popular, tropes in films.”“Excellent – greenlit!”
I haven’t seen Furie but I’d heard good things about it so it bums me out that Le-Van Kiet seems like he hasn’t made a good movie since. His shark movie sounded especially bad too.I always get a little excited when a Vietnamese person gets close to mainstream success. So it’s personally a little sad that Furie might be the outlier.
It was like a very low effort “Die Hard” in a castle tower. It was fine & unintentionally silly. Reminded me of the low budget fantasy movies of the 1980s like Hawk the Slayer and The Beastmaster and many others.
I don’t think old men should reviews on movies like this.
I initially read the sub-headline as “Director Lee Van Cleef” and was immediately interested.
I’ve stopped and started it three times now and am only about halfway through. I was hoping for a dumb but fun time-waster. Instead it’s just dumb and exhausting. I’m trying to think if I’ve heard King’s character string more than two words together in 45 minutes. If you close your eyes, it sounds like a really long and intense Monica Seles tennis match. Even some Friday night chemical enhancement couldn’t help me get through it in one sitting. Sigh.
Im guessing that that if this was a Jason Statham flic all the “please God, let me feel an actual women’s breast just once in my life’ incels would be hooting and hollering how amazing it is, maybe you should have watched the movie instead of relying on Brent Simons obvious misogynistic bullshit review, was there too much action in the action movie Brent? Not enough plot in an actioner?Why so much anger in a review of a perfectly likeable film? Or is it that women are the hero and not your stereotype eh?And what’s with the head tilt in your photo?