The Princess (Hulu Streaming-2022) We can imagine this movie's screenwriters, Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton, high-fiving each other into a coma.....in love with their own cleverness at coming up with such a singular, outrageous gimmick of an idea.......
Memo to both of them: Sorry boys......hate to break it to ya, but a few other movies got there before you did with this brainstorm........and honestly, those movies came out just as monotonous and generic as "The Princess".
What's this big genius idea we refer to?
Simple. Use the skimpy plot merely as a 'get ready, get set, go!' for what will take up the bulk of film's running time.......non-stop, wall to wall action and carnage, with no pesky storyline to slow it down.
In this movie's generic vaguely Medieval never-neverland (an unholy mash-up of "Game Of Thrones" and Disney cartoons) a plucky Princess (Joey King) wakes up manacled in the top floor of her Rapunzel-like tower.
Our nameless royal sweetie awaits a forced swordpoint wedding to the sneering, snarling usurping warrior Julius (Dominic Cooper) who's also taken her royal mom 'n pop hostage.
In his nefarious plundering, Julius is aided and abetted by Moira, his whip-wielding, dominatrix outfitted badass babe-of-babes (the always formidable Bond Girl, Olga Kurylenko, channeling Famke Jansen's 'Xenia Onatopp' from "Goldeneye")
So much for the story......that's all you need to know. Once the cutie-pie Princess gets up and around, she launches into a perpetual, neverending series of punishingly brutal, CGI-enhanced battles. Our adorable little dynamo, fiercely engages with a castle full of of Julius's minions, all of them fully equipped with broadswords, spears axes and other assorted instruments, both sharpened and blunt.
We'll freely admit that for the first 15 minutes or so, watching the diminutive King hurl herself into acrobatic punch-ups and slash-o-ramas with an army of hulking brutes is pure guilty pleasure wahooooo fun.......
But 95 minutes of it? It probably never occurred to the filmmakers that after you've watched Joey swing a sword into some stuntman's solar plexus for the 500th time.....well, the thrill begins to dim......and the yawns start to come easier.
Some of the countless fights are indeed well choreographed and propulsive, but with so damn many of them piling up, we can't even remember which individual ones we liked more than others .By the time it all winds up, we felt as exhausted, breathless and worn out as the Princess.
Fanboys who salivate over girls' Comic-Con cosplay outfits won't want to miss this, though. And Joey King's a talented enough young actress who deserves way, way better projects than this. A born trouper, she seizes the day here with full fury and we could only wish the producers had given her a real movie worthy of the enthusiasm and volcanic energy she displays all the way through it.
2 stars (**) for her tireless combat......when it comes to mixing it up with the goons, the Princess brings the royal pain.
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