The Princess Review: A Film Between Action And Video Games On Hulu and Disney+
Cast: Joey King, Dominic Cooper, Olga Kurylenko, Veronica Ngo
Director: Le-Van Kiet
Streaming Platform: Disney+
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
The Princess Review: The Princess is available on Disney+ and Hulu Star starting July 1, 2022. Directed by Vietnamese Le-Van Kiet and starring Joey King, Dominic Cooper, Veronica Ngo and Olga Kurylenko. Le-Van Kiet is the director of Furie, a 2019 Vietnamese martial arts film nominated (but not nominated) for an Oscar for Best International Film, the biggest box office success in the country’s history. If that’s not enough, it should be remembered that behind The Princess is the production team of Fast and Furious and John Wick. It was essential to begin by providing some type of information to make it clear that if intentions are still worth something, this is not, it is not meant to be, the usual fairy tale or not?
The Princess Review: The Story
Sleeping Beauty Joey King wakes up from a long and strange sleep in the most inaccessible room at the top of the farthest tower of her father’s castle. She needs some time to refocus things and remember exactly who she is, what she is doing there, and why. The Princess plays with a whole series of clichés, she scrupulously pays homage to conventions and atmosphere, just to overturn them as soon as she gets the chance. The possibility comes soon. Because if it is true that there is a castle, a princess and even a beautiful promise of marriage, it is equally true that the combination of these narrative keys and the protagonist’s way of being in the world openly challenges the standard of (and of) genre. Modern fairy tale, complete with female empowerment and an action imprint.
No spoilers, that’s what you need to know. Dominic Cooper is the evil aristocrat who wants to marry the princess. Man of little imagination, he has prosaic aims, love has nothing to do with it, he just wants to take the kingdom of which the girl would theoretically be the heir. He gets help from the very dangerous Olga Kurylenko and from an army of mercenaries that he sets to guard the room in which he imprisoned Joey King after the latter refused his questionable marriage proposals. Even in fairy tales or presumed such, some bad men struggle to accept that no means no. What the villain ignores, but that the viewer can grasp with a certain speed, is that this princess is of a new kind. A series of strategic flashbacks break the fast pace of the action to make us understand how and why the young woman is different from the others.
What she likes to do is viewed in the family with a certain suspicion, because they are choices that do not conform to the model of the pleasantly submissive aristocrat. Everyone is made to live in freedom: The Princess links a general discourse, the right of every woman to choose on her own, to a closer look at the tastes and inclinations of the protagonist. She knows how to do things that are traditionally reserved for the male audience only. Her warrior talent is a nice mix: the teachings of a good teacher, Veronica Ngo, at the bottom of a congenital predisposition. He will put his talent at the service of the cause. There is an army to defeat, a castle to free, a villain to liquidate. To rejoin the family and live his life as he prefers.
The Princess Review And Analysis
Directed by Le-Van Kiet and starring Joey King, The Princess is a film that manages to surprise the viewer thanks to its approach to the story, which seems classic but then, in a short time, turns into an action-adventure, reminiscent of The Raid for its staging, Kill Bill for its nameless protagonist and the Disney-Pixar film Brave where protagonist, in addition to physically resembling Joey King, rejects his role imposed by society and rebels against it.
It is true, that The Princess does not seem to reserve anything original, but it amuses and entertains. It’s also notable for the fact that it was developed on a relatively low budget with a small cast and only one location. The fights are well-choreographed, especially the main ones, the ones with many extras are less so: not all of them do their job very well. Ultimately, it is an enjoyable film with a good and expressive Joye King, who is the protagonist of the successful Netflix trilogy entitled The Kissing Booth. The actress born in 1999 also starred alongside Brad Pitt in David Leitch’s recent Bullet Train.
There is a strong sense of immediacy, everything happens in the space of a few hours, and the inexorable sense of a progression (of facts, of feelings) almost like a video game that gives the film freshness, especially in the first half-hour, if there was no trouble. Good alchemy between the young student and the teacher Veronica Ngo. Slightly sacrificed Olga Kurylenko who replies, overturning them, certain premises that the film reserves for the protagonist. Dominic Cooper serves the purpose and draws his version of the evil, abusive man.
Atonement, as understood by an entertainment industry that after having tolerated abominable spectacles for centuries, turning away, now realizes not only that there are wrong men, but also that one can survive by shaming them and putting oneself on the right side. This is the strength and limit of the operation. The Princess takes care to protect the independence of her protagonist, assigns her once-precluded skills, she creates a tailor-made story with a nice pace and an interesting relationship with time Not only. While intervening on the reference model of femininity and opening it to unprecedented possibilities, she does not fall into the Sarah Connor syndrome, she does not try to counter the stereotype with the stereotype, of the virile, masculinized woman. What works for Terminator applies to Terminator, period.
Many films have struggled to understand this, The Princess does not fall into this trap. The problem is the “transparency” of the model. The film, much more than an action and entertainment product, serves as an x-ray of the system’s attempts to react to the shocks of recent years by devising the new great formula. In its desire to be perfectly and sensationally in tune with the audience’s appetite, the film finds more than one point of contact with previous versions of the story. He writes down a convention to build a new one, at the same time the same and radically different. The film is enjoyable and more conservative than it looks.
If the videogame aspect is taken up by director Le-Van Kiet in a harmonious way, they do not make the work jerky in the various passages that compose it, it is the repetitiveness that flattens the story and the staging, depriving the work of any element of originality. The continuous fights between the princess and the warlike side soon drop the attention of a spectator who can perfectly grasp the intentions of the film and appreciate each time the different ideas with which to impale, quarter, and massacre an opponent, but who at the thousandth bloodshed realizes that a film cannot be based solely on a scheme that is certainly well-devised and yet expressed with such predictability.
Also deprives him of a climax that no longer manages to fuel events and history, not allowing the story to explode at the end and, thus, not even the rest of the film. Joey King is good as a protagonist even if it is certainly not the actor’s proof that he manages to come out of an operation like The Princess. It is his physical outfit that surprises and leaves the viewer admired, who will have nothing to share with a character who, as if moved by an imaginary joystick, acts only mechanically, respecting the style and coherence of the film. but leaving the audience detached. Princesses no longer need the knight on a valiant steed, but sometimes they still need good stories that know how to frame them. Of narratives that can be complete both in the filmic text and in their rhythm. Not neglecting either one or the other, even when you just want to entertain those who are watching.
The Princess Review: The Last Words
If the stories about the princesses have leaped forward, The Princess seems to have stuck to a model that is certainly functional, but which cannot keep the entire time of a film unless it is repetitive and always the same. This is because the film is based on a videogame scheme in which the protagonist must overcome a new increasingly complicated and bloody level on each floor, creating an absurdly opposite effect and that instead of bringing the story to a climax ends up flattening it, thus concluding. Brava Joey King, more for the physical endurance than for the actual actor proof.
