The Princess movie review: Disney+ Hotstar’s horrid fantasy film is unbearable at even 90 minutes long

While the found-footage superhero drama Chronicle was beloved, Frankenstein bombed, and modern-day fantasy Bright tanked with the critics. After the allegations, his high-profile future project headlined by Idris Elba was swept under the rug, and Landis’ name was effectively removed from Shadow in the Cloud, a rather well-made period sci-fi film that shares a remarkable degree of similarity—both thematically and stylistically—with this week’s Disney+ Hotstar release The Princess.

Starring Joey King as an, uh, princess who wakes up from slumber in a tower one day and finds that she has been arranged to marry a terrible man, the roughly 85-minute action film bucks fantasy tropes and unfolds like something that even Max Landis would’ve rejected after typing out 12 pages. But as palpable as his influence on it might seem, The Princess has no connection to the disgraced screenwriter at all—there’s no pseudonym situation happening here. Instead, it’s written by two people—Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton—who seem to be well on their way to replacing Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (Dracula Untold, Gods of Egypt, and for heaven’s sake, Morbius) as Hollywood’s most indefensible writer duos.

With no discernible plot to speak of, the feeblest of attempts at developing characters, and a lack of humour that is frankly distressing, The Princess is more a collection of poorly choreographed combat scenes than an actual movie.

But most egregiously, it’s one of those edgy modern genre films that are defined by a false sense of smugness about how woke they are. The Princess belongs to that category of feminist cinema which wants to be empowering (usually through violence) but also can’t seem to resist contriving scenarios that compel its heroines to shed their clothes. As an experiment, I kept tabs this time. King loses her first bit of clothing in the opening fight scene, and by the end of the first act, she’s walking around in a strategically torn version of the elegant white dress that she was introduced in. This is more common than you might imagine—I complained about a similar situation not three weeks ago—but it’s always troubling when filmmakers lean into such these tropes unknowingly.

Is it written on stone somewhere that female action heroines must be dressed suggestively? So many people pointed out the difference between Zack Snyder’s male gaze and how Patty Jenkins photographed Gal Gadot in the DCEU films. The same people probably criticised Snyder for how he’d designed the characters in his largely reviled 2011 fantasy film Sucker Punch. But that was deliberate. Whatever’s happening in The Princess seems like a deeply ingrained societal problem.

The film marks the Hollywood debut of Vietnamese director Le-Van Kiet, although it shows little evidence of authorship of any kind. The Princess borrows elements from here and there, as it cobbles together the thinnest action story since Robert Rodriguez’s second season episode of The Mandalorian. To balance its virtually airless primary plot, it abruptly cuts to flashbacks in which the Princess, like Wonder Woman and Arya Stark before her, is trained in combat by some vaguely exotic looking masters.

The only person who seems to have understood the assignment is Dominic Cooper. He adds some of the same unhinged energy to his villainous character here that he brought so memorably to his turn as Uday Hussein in Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double. But like virtually every other actor in this film, he’s grasping at straws.

The Princess
Director – Le-Van Kiet
Cast – Joey King, Dominic Cooper, Olga Kurylenko, Veronica Ngo
Rating – 1/5