Let’s be clear right away: “The Princess” isn’t even amusing trash, so we’ll try to figure out what the film lacked and how it could have been made into a fun, wild ride.
Synopsis
A beautiful princess (Joey King) wakes up in the highest tower of her father’s castle (Ed Stoppard) with her hands bound. She faces the threat of being forcibly married off to the bloody tyrant Julius (Dominic Cooper), who dreams of usurping the throne.
But the villains will have to postpone their plan to seize the kingdom for a while, because the princess is not going to give up without a fight. All that’s left is to figure out who is really the hunter and who is the prey.
“The Princess” vs. Genre Expectations
We live in a rather difficult time when every new movie must deconstruct something. Most often, this happens with genre expectations. Before, if a hero in an action movie fearlessly went up against a big criminal gang, he knew full well that they weren’t afraid of him and could destroy him at any moment (for example, in “Die Hard,” “The Rock,” or “Rambo”). As a deconstruction, we get “John Wick,” whom the Russian mafia is terrified of—meaning David and Goliath have swapped places.
“The Princess” tries to remind the viewer of old fantasy genre clichés, where the hero bravely rescues the princess, who passively waits for her liberation. At the same time, the rethinking of these clichés in relation to the main (and nameless) heroine fits perfectly into the modern agenda, where women are expected to be strong, independent, and more competent than toxic-masculine men.
But there are two snags.
The first is that we’ve seen the rethinking of these clichés so many times that it itself becomes a cliché. Leia, Fiona, Mononoke, Merida, Rapunzel, Arwen and Éowyn, Anna and Elsa… The list could go on for a very long time.
The second is that to pull off a deconstruction interestingly enough, you need at least to make the character themselves interesting, to give them a personality. The main heroine of “The Princess” fails this criterion completely. Her personality boils down solely to the fact that she loves to fight and doesn’t want to be given to a potential suitor “like a thing.” That’s it. We don’t know what she’s interested in, what she’s afraid of, what she dreams about. We don’t know anything else about her, even though we saw enough flashbacks.
Who Is “The Princess” Made For?
The problems with the characters don’t end with Joey King’s heroine. Dominic Cooper and Olga Kurylenko turned out to be incredibly, astonishingly, cardboard antagonists. Their motivations are so clichéd and uninteresting that it’s simply indecent. In Soviet cartoons for the youngest children, villains are better developed. The same goes for everyone else—I forgot about the mentor played by Veronica Ngo two minutes after the movie ended, the king and queen clearly have nothing to do, and the main character’s younger sister obviously doesn’t understand what she’s doing on set. Neither do I.
A natural question arises—who is “The Princess” made for? Because any adult viewer has already seen similar plots a million times and won’t be able to take the story seriously. They simply can’t ignore the secondhand nature of what’s happening and the naivety of the plot.
If you say it’s made for children—then the R rating (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) disagrees. Here you have eyeball stabbings with sharp objects, beheadings, and even one (failed) attempted gang rape of a maid.
Other Absurdities
Okay. Let’s assume you don’t mind an extremely simple and unpretentious plot. Let’s even assume you just want to enjoy some well-staged carnage in a fantasy setting. I’m sorry to disappoint—you’re unlikely to fully succeed.
The lack of budget is visible in everything. In the stale soundtrack, in the sets, in the costumes—the main heroine walks around in a dress that looks more like a curtain. The screenwriters slacked off as much as they could; the incredible stupidity of all the castle’s inhabitants and guests is off the charts. Makeup is barely noticeable; the extras just smeared dirt on their faces. There aren’t many effects, but they’re worse than in “The Amazing Adventures of Hercules.” Honestly, I witnessed such bad animation of a burning person that YouTube reviews do it better.
“The Princess” is 99% fight scenes that don’t advance the plot or the characters’ inner stories, so the only one who worked like crazy here is the fight choreographer. And he honestly tried. But it’s impossible to pack 95 minutes of screen time with fights so that each one is original and not stupid (especially when the director keeps throwing a wrench in the works by shooting all the flaws in close-up). So we get divinely stupid decisions from NPC characters who deliberately move at a snail’s pace so King can dodge. And if the heroine is surrounded by twenty people—they’ll, of course, approach her one by one.
Conclusion (and a Bit About Trash)
Why was “The Princess” even made? I have only two guesses—for a fun trailer and a demo reel that Joey King will show during action movie auditions.
And even with only what the choreographer Le-Van Kiet had, you could make something interesting from the components. You could have built trash even wilder than in “Shoot ‘Em Up”! For example, if the creators had dared to make the main heroine a bloodthirsty psychopath who cuts off people’s heads left and right for no reason, and Dominic Cooper, on the contrary, came to rescue her from the tower but was forced to fight her off. Then the budget constraints would have been less noticeable, and the plot would have required much less.
But as it is—neither trash came out, nor feminist fantasy. Only an hour and a half of boredom came out. So it’s better to find something else to your taste from the list.
Another reincarnation of Batman, an impressive Russian debut, hits from the independent studio A24, and other standout projects in our list of the 10 best films of the first half of 2022.
Open materialP.S. It was very funny to see so many Slavic surnames among the extras. Just take a look!
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