Mark Reviews Movies: THE PRINCESS

The Princess, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 1, 2022

The camera sweeps across the sea and toward a castle, standing sturdy on the edge of a precipice, and it pushes closer and closer toward the top level of the edifice's tall tower. Through the window, we find a princess, of course, at the start of The Princess. She looks like someone out of a fairy tale, resting peacefully, as if in the kind of magical slumber that is a key part of so many of those stories, and dressed in fancy dress of pure white.

It's always fascinating how much filmmakers can communicate with such little information, based solely on our awareness of conventions, expectations, and other tales, and here, director Le-Van Kiet sets us up for a very specific sort of story. When this princess awakens to reveal that her arms are shackled, we know something's not quite right with that initial anticipation. When the Princess dislocates a thumb to free herself of a shackle, things certainly take a turn. By the time she pummels one guard to a bloody pulp and sends the other out that tower window with a flying roundhouse kick, we've definitely figured out that this is no simple fairy tale.

It's something else simple—perhaps even more simplistic than that, unfortunately. The conceit of the plot here is that this princess, played with impressive physicality and imposing attitude by a stand-out Joey King, is a prisoner. She must fight, sneak, run, swing, leap, and further fight her way through and down this tower, in an effort to save her family, friends, and entire kingdom from a dastardly villain and his various right-hands, muscle-bound goons, and anonymous henchmen. That's the extent of the plot and, for that matter, the characters in this tale, which starts with at least an initial flash of kick-in-the-pants inspiration, only to succumb to how shallow and repetitive the whole affair is.

That Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton's screenplay also plays as a minor mystery doesn't help matters. We know nothing about the Princess at first, except that she's a prisoner, that she was intended to be a bride, and that someone drugged her in order for her to locked up in a room on the top floor of the tower.

As she makes her way from floor to floor and room to room on her trip toward the bottom, some flashbacks explain both the barebones back story and how this seemingly demure and dainty young woman became such a skilled and deadly fighter. It's completely unnecessary, of course, especially in how detailed those flashbacks are in terms of information, without digging into anything about the characters within the story or the politics of the conflict. The constant moves into the past do, at least, get this short story to feature length, though.

In summary, the Princess was meant to marry Julius (Dominic Cooper), so that her father the King (Ed Stoppard) would have a male heir to the throne. She left Julius at the altar, and in a rage, he returned with his army to lay siege to the castle and force the Princess to marry him. That's it, yet the movie treats it as some puzzle to solve and some exposition of much greater import about the nature of a society that treats women as commodities to be traded. It doesn't much need that message, considering how loudly and forcefully King's presence speaks toward the obvious counterpoint.

As for the Princess' combat training, she was taught by Linh (Veronica Ngo), who eventually finds the Princess and helps her on her violent quest, and the teacher's father Khai (Kristofer Kamiyasu), who gifted the royal his own sword for her prowess in battle. Anyway, the Princess eventually retrieves that sword, but before that, she uses those shackles, a hairpin, a stolen crossbow, and even some ribbon, as well as her hands and feet, to dispatch various guards, soldiers, knights, and mountainous thugs along the way. When Julius and his whip-wielding consort Moira (Olga Kurylenko) learn the Princess has escaped, they send more goons and guards after her.

That's also it in terms of the actual plotting, which offers action scene after action scene, with all of those dull flashbacks inserted between them to break up both the momentum and the monotony of such non-stop fighting. Kiet stages the assorted brawls with fine sense of camera placement and movement, which lets us have good views of all the maneuvering and blows being landed, but there quickly comes a point when the only element providing any sense of distinction to the multiple fights is the shifting of locales. The castle and its various rooms are designed with a level of historical and fairy-tale authenticity, to be sure, but they become little more than backdrops with distinct lighting and props (to be occasionally used against opponents) for the bloody, bone-breaking carnage that unfolds.

There's little denying that King is a star in the making. Hopefully, her role in The Princess, which she realizes with wit and ferocity, will further her career—and lead to better material.

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