Movie Review: 'The King's Daughter' should stay buried

Jan. 20—Sometimes the best things about the dumping-ground movie releases in January are the stories behind them.

In the time "The King's Daughter" was shot, its star Kaya Scodelario met her future husband and co-star Benjamin Walker on the set, got married to him and had two kids.

This is because the movie was shot in 2014, when events like a global pandemic weren't happening, the social media app Vine was the TikTok of its time and Pierce Brosnan had not yet scored another big paycheck with "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" and the upcoming DC Comics movie "Black Adam."

The year this was made doesn't necessarily matter, as it would be a bad film at any point in history.

Based on the novel "The Moon and the Sun" by Vonda N. McIntyre, "The King's Daughter" feels like your standard lost princess story. Marie-Josèphe (Scodelario) is a wild, carefree spirit in France, where everyone is stuffy and stern. When she's summoned to live with her illegitimate father, King Louis XIV (Brosnan), she discovers a mermaid (Fan Bingbing) whose song speaks to her heart.

The movie then takes a wild turn as the aging King Louis XIV thinks the mermaid could be his ticket to immortality, so he wants it killed so he can attain its life force. Also, there's a love story between Marie-Josèphe and Yves De La Croix (Walker, looking like he walked off of "The Hobbit" set) tacked on to pad out the movie's 90-minute running time.

Directed by Sean McNamara, who's mostly known for buried sequels like "Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite!" and "3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain," "The King's Daughter" has the look and feel of a movie that was meant to go straight to DVD back when those still sold by the ton in 2014.

No scene seems to last longer than 90 seconds, as it bounces the audience around from appropriately garish and elegant set pieces, like a ballroom dance between Louis XIV and Marie-Josèphe to caves that look like they were filmed at an amusement park. Each scene has a character explain what's happening and how they're feeling and then they're whisked away to the next environment, like the editor was deathly afraid the audience would get bored.

To its credit, Brosnan, clad in a hilarious wig, seems to know what kind of movie he is in and vamps up a storm as the villain. Scodelario, who has gone on to have some impressive performances in movies like "Crawl" and "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile," struggles to get her footing, but she has enough natural charm and screen presence to elevate an underwritten role. The same can't be said for William Hurt as Père La Chaise, whose monotone performance makes me think he did his lines at gunpoint.

While "The King's Daughter" can't be recommended, I think a documentary on the making of it, its frequent delays and why it was chosen to be screened exclusively in theaters would be a fascinating watch. Pair it with the film and you might have something. Until then, you don't have much with this.

Andrew Gaug can be reached at andrew.gaug@newspressnow.com.

Follow him on Twitter: @NPNOWGaug