THE KING OF KINGS (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The King of Kings, Angel Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 10, 2025

Charles Dickens did write a version of the story of Jesus of Nazareth for his children, although it's not as well known as his other works, given that it wasn't published, according to Dickens' own wishes, until after the deaths of the author and all of his children. That bit of literary trivia is the foundation of writer/director Seong-ho Jang's computer-animated The King of Kings, which frames Jesus' story through Dickens, one of his kids, and the family cat. This is a strange and unnecessarily distancing decision.

Perhaps Jang, making his directorial debut, believed the narrative of Jesus has been told so many times—in movies and across so many different mediums—that his version needed some gimmick to make it unique. The notion of having one of the most endearing and enduring writers tell that story in his own voice seems like a fine conceit.

Even with Kenneth Branagh offering his vocal talents as Dickens, though, nothing about the author's perspective, personality, or worldview really comes through here. He is little more than routine narrator, reciting a tale most people almost certainly know to some degree already, and it's not as if the Jesus of this iteration, voiced by Oscar Isaac, is unique or memorable, either. The screenplay follows the broad outline of the Biblical narrative, mainly focusing on the supernatural side of Jesus, and basically makes him into little more than a source of miracles and familiar axioms.

After a spending a lot of time with Dickens and some Victorian-era shenanigans involving a live reading of A Christmas Carol and the writer's kids causing havoc backstage, the author settles down with his young son Walter (voice of Roman Griffin Davis), who is currently obsessed with the myth of King Arthur, to tell the boy—and his beloved and trouble-making cat, of course—the story of another king. From there, the narrative is only notable for how rushed Jesus' story is and how the present-day pair imagine themselves inside the world of the Biblical tale.

That's to say Jang's screenplay gives us the basics. Jesus is born in a manger in Bethlehem to Mary and her husband Jospeh, against the backdrop of wise men, shepherds, celestial signs and angelic wonders, and the jealous King Herod (voice of Mark Hamill). Herod orders the deaths of all recently born boys in the region, but Jesus' parents escape to Egypt, only to forgotten almost as quickly as the infanticidal king.

After a brief scene of Jesus' childhood, the movie picks up with the man's teachings and the incarnate deity's miracles, and the reason Jang includes a framing device might be as simple as the limitations of the source material. If one simply presents the broad strokes and doesn't attempt to add anything else, it might be a stretch to get a feature-length movie out of that story, and even with the framing device, this one clearly struggles to hit a family-friendly run time (if one ignores this particular distributor's added testimonials and calls to purchase additional tickets before the credits, obviously). In trying to stay true to source, the movie reveals just how barebones it is.

The look of the movie has a similar feel. The backdrops of temples, vast deserts, towns and a bustling Jerusalem, and the scenes of Jesus' passion and death are striking and even beautiful at times, such as Jesus' emergence from a crowd to be baptized, as his head his illuminated by a halo-like glow from the setting sun. The characters, however, are only noteworthy for oversized heads sitting atop gangly bodies and some frame-skipping animation. The whole thing has the air of a rushed production, which is at least in line with the hastiness of the storytelling.

From Jesus, we get miracle after miracle—all of the greatest hits, really, of making a blind man see, curing another man of paralysis, raising a friend from the dead, multiplying fishes and loaves of bread for a vast crowd, and, in another of those moments that possesses some unexpected visual grandeur, calmly walking across a raging sea. Occasionally, he says something wise to his followers or clever to challenge the Pharisees trying to catch him speaking blasphemy or to ruin his reputation, but this portrayal of Jesus is so set on highlighting his divinity that the movie sacrifices everything else surrounding him.

It's a sincere effort, at least, with a notable cast that also includes glorified vocal cameos from the likes of Ben Kingsley (as a high priest), Pierce Brosnan (as the hand-washing Pontius Pilate), Forest Whittaker (as the disciple Peter), and Uma Thurman (as Dickens' wife), as well as voice-acting mainstays Jim Cummings, Fred Tatasciore, and others. In trying so hard to appeal to and keep the attention of kids, The King of Kings stumbles in its clashing tones, between the jokey framing narrative and the one it probably should focus on more, and its often-simplistic aesthetic.

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