The King’s Daughter: Irredeemable

It is April of 2014. Pierce Brosnan’s latest action thriller The November Man is still four months from release. Kaya Scodelario is about to make her mainstream debut in September with The Maze Runner and Fan Bingbing is about a month away from her introduction to American audiences with X-Men: Days of Future Past. As all of these movies are in the future. All of this is happening as The King’s Daughter is entering principal photography before being released eight years later. It was pulled from the release calendar three weeks out from its 2015 release date to work on the special effects.

One would think that with all that time that the movie had sitting on the shelf, one would be watching visual effects on the caliber of Avatar. They would be wrong however as the effects are laughable, even for 2014’s standards. The plot is nonsensical, the acting is atrocious, and it is obvious why Paramount would have rather let this movie sit on a shelf for almost a decade before selling it to the subsidiary of the company that runs Impact Wrestling just to get it off their books. This movie lacks the audacity of The Room or Foodfight to at least be comedically bad. It takes itself too serious for a movie about a king who wants to sap the life from a mermaid to be immortal himself.

It is rare that a movie can come out and not have a single good quality about it. A movie about the production failings of this movie would be better and more entertaining to watch than the movie that is released. The biggest failing is that the movie is based on a book that, in an interest of full disclosure I have not read, is by all accounts a great book that will ultimately never get a solid theatrical adaptation because Hollywood learns the wrong lessons from failings like this.

On the other hand, one does have to respect the distributor’s audacity to buy the movie, see it, think “yeah this is a great idea” and do a 2,000+ screen release for this movie. It was as if Paramount was a person who paid a ton of money for something eight years ago, found it while cleaning out their attic, brought it to a flea market and unloaded it for a fraction of the cost so they wouldn’t have to look at it anymore and then the new owner realized that it was a piece of trash and spent hundreds of thousands of extra dollars trying to sell it on Facebook.

This movie is not worth risking getting Covid to see, it is not worth even risking getting a common cold to see. If they paid a viewer to see it, it might be worth seeing, but even then its debatable.

Final Rating: 0/10

For more stories like this sent directly to your email, subscribe here!