The King’s Daughter review: Yes, Pierce Brosnan tries to murder a mermaid

The King’s Daughter This fantasy-themed epic is expensive and took nearly a decade to reach shelves. It finally reached wide release in January on a quiet weekend with very little promotion. This anti-pedigree combined with its bizarre fantasy plot about magic, mermaid murderer and other elements make it a spectacular cinematic disaster. So it’s perversely disappointing to learn that it’s a middling family-friendly movie with mere undertones of oddness.

The film is based on Vonda N. McIntyre’s 1997 novel The Moon and SunThe fantasy that defeated George R.R. Martin’s Game of ThronesTo the 1997 Best Novel Nebula Award. Her book is a mix of historical romance and sci-fi. It includes hidden treasures, sea monsters and forbidden love. The movie is considerably simplified from that story — it’s a fantasy-adventure with hastily added, largely redundant Julie Andrews narration to give it the veneer of a cozy fairy tale.

In this form, its story concerns Marie-Josèphe (Kaya Scodelario), the headstrong secret daughter of 17th-century French king Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnan). Louis has taken Fan Bingbing (a mermaid), whom he will sacrifice in an eclipse to get its life force, and immortality. Marie-Josèphe’s tentative relationship with the mermaid gets in the way of that plan. Yet The King’s DaughterThis description is often more bizarre than it actually appears. The film is a bittersweet tale of a movie that is trying to make a mainstream version. An outright boondoggle could have been better.

Photo: Gravitas Ventures

It’s no accident that all this sounds like a flashback to the mid-2010s, when slightly odd (but not quite odd enough) epics like 2013’s 47 Ronin and 2014’s Seventh Son attempted to mount large-canvas fantasy stories fueled by producers’ notions of capitalizing on the success of Lord of the RingsThe Harry Potter movies and/or the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Though it’s officially a 2022 release, The King’s DaughterIt was taken eight years ago. Septième Son 47 RoninParamount was forced to withdraw from every theater in the country. Paramount had announced a release date for early 2015. However, it disappeared without explanation just weeks before the film was scheduled to go onscreen. The project has not been reported on since then, with only vague whispers about additional work being needed for its visual effects. The movie was eventually distributed by Gravitas Ventures, a smaller distributor.

One of the greatest things about The King’s Daughter is that it doesn’t immediately give the impression that it’s been moldering on the shelf for the better part of a decade. It can be attributed to industry-wide visual effects stagnation. Blurry CG is now an evergreen! and Scodelario’s seemingly ageless charm. Looking closer, there are moments where it feels slightly out of step with this decade, like the way Marie-Josèphe is assigned a lady-in-waiting, Magali (Crystal Clarke), who’s really a cheerfully supportive stock Black friend with no particular personality or goals of her own. The movie does not acknowledge slavery, but it drops one line about Magali’s being taken from her family and then never returns to her.

The movie has some great remnants from the past. For example, it uses real sets and location shooting. Both of these have been out of favor for fantasy films with large budgets in recent years. The baseline visual splendor here is surprisingly strong, though director Sean McNamara doesn’t assemble the beautiful sights with much rhythm — sometimes scenes cut off abruptly, and the multitude of credited editors suggests a great deal of tinkering.

Photo: Gravitas Ventures

McNamara’s career is astonishingly prolific. He dashing back and forth among big-screen inspiring dramas such as The Miracle SeasonOder Soul Surfer and direct-to-video sequels to movies he didn’t Originate, like Cats & Dogs 3 orWendy and Casper meet. The studio movies he made often had a hint of Christian piety. The King’s DaughterThe trend continues with William Hurt as a priest speaking out against the sins of mermaid murdering. It’s almost novel that a film priest attempts to live within his declared moral code and not hide, enable, or preach a criminal agenda. Although he has some regrettable confessional chats after his morning, he is not allowed to speak with the king about various romance entanglements.

In this context, though, the story pits religion against science in an unfair fight: One side, comprised of 17th-century villains, advocates for the “science” of draining a mermaid’s life in what’s essentially a mystical rite, while the good guys believe that killing is both wrong and, in this case, an affront to God, defying normal human mortality.

The subplot is distracting from the main relationships in the movie, and it goes beyond the noble moralizing. One is the father-daughter awkwardness between Louis and Marie-Josèphe, who was sent away to grow up in a convent, and had no idea she descends from royalty. It is clear that she doesn’t think about this cruelty much in the movie. By the time she finds out that the king who has summoned her to Versailles is really her father, they’ve already formed a tenuous bond, which is immediately threatened by his dual-track plan to kill the mermaid and marry his daughter off to a loathsome duke.

Still, at least it’s fun to watch Scodelario and Brosnan lean into their willful, melodramatic conflicts while wearing fabulous costumes. The other driving relationship in the movie, between Marie-Josèphe and the mermaid, develops largely off-screen. Chinese star Fan Bingbing doesn’t contribute a performance, so much as likeness rights: She serves as the visual basis for a CG mermaid who never feels “all but human,” as Marie-Josèphe claims. Benjamin Walker also plays Scodelario’s fisherman love story.

Photo: Gravitas Ventures

Although the actors were able to become real-life friends after filming the movie together, this movie shows very little evidence of their chemistry. It’s hard for any other characters to compete with the attention the filmmakers lavish on Scodelario. She is a beautiful, ethereal presence in every shot. But the story too often focuses on her uniqueness and doesn’t allow her to connect with other characters. “Look at these girls… I don’t fit in here,” the absolutely gorgeous woman muses at one point while looking at other gorgeous women. At the same time, she displays almost no discomfort over moving from a convent to court, beyond insisting that she doesn’t need makeup to look good.

It’s understandable that the film seems fixated on its star at the expense of the other characters. Scodelario does have real charisma, which she’s since shown off in more menacing genre fare like CrawlThe most recent Resident Evil reboot. Here, she’s stuck auditioning for future plucky-princess parts in a project that rarely shows the courage of its own ridiculousness. McNamara treats the material earnestly, but there’s calculation underneath — the final film lacks the heedless, gleeful world-building of a gonzo blockbuster. This is a problem it also shares. Seventh SonAnd 47 Ronin.) Even in the kid-movie realm, it isn’t quite engaging enough to work as more than a passing distraction with a few neat design touches. The movie in which star-crossed lovers are spending so much time talking about their love and mermaids should have a lot more entertainment. The King’s Daughter.

The King’s DaughterJanuary 21st, debuts in theatres You can find tickets right here.