Review of The King (2019) by Reezethevampire — 07 Nov 2019

I truly cannot fathom how anyone considers this so much as a decent movie. Let me sum up the good parts: the lighting is good, the acting is fine overall, the cinematography is generally decent with a handful of god awful shots.

With that out of the way, let me state this movie's biggest problem; this is a near two and a half hour long movie that has less narrative content that a 20 minute episode of a children's cartoon. Here is a summary: The king is about to die but his eldest son is a drunk so he wants to give the position to his younger son, but the younger son dies so the eldest son becomes king.

The movie takes the entire first HOUR to say that. I would say about 60% of that hour could be cut with zero impact to the plot in any way, shape, or form. Then it takes the next half hour to give the King a goal, confirm he is a pacifist, use trebuchet on a castle, and introduce our main antagonist an hour into the film with about 2 minutes of screen time.

Then we spend the next 15 minutes quite literally walking through a forest to discover a big enemy force. Then there is another minute long scene with the antagonist, the worst medieval battle I've ever seen with tactics that make no sense, and then the antagonist is killed by extras because he slipped in the mud.

We are now at about 115 minutes. What's the next 25 minutes, you may ask? People talking about the stuff that we just watched and then the King gets scolded for being a war monger even though he is a pacifist.

This movie could have been an hour long episode of GoT but decided to spend an hour and half accomplishing absolutely nothing with countless dead shots, conversations that lead no where and mean nothing, and B roll.

On top of all of this the character of the King makes zero sense and flips back and forth in personality between just about every scene. I also cannot overstate how awful the battle at the end was. They build it up to be a big, brutal battle where the enemy is countered because there is some mud.

There is no blood, no limbs, no screams of death, no fires, nothing; it was the least convincing battle I have ever seen in any movie of any type of any genre. Even showing the aftermath there are a few dozen men laying in mud; no wounded men screaming, no blood-soaked grass, no limbs, no men stuck on spears, nothing.

Also, the King here kills a few people in the 'big battle' by punching them in the face...while they were wearing helmets. Absolute drivel.