The Princess is an original 20th Century Fox-sorry-20th Century Studios film on Disney Plus (have I mentioned how much I hate that new Studios name) and stars Joey King as the Princess who is locked in a tower of her nearby kingdom after refusing to marry a local Lord played by Dominic Cooper, she manages to escape the Tower but must fight her way down to the bottom in order to save her family.
The Princess is definitely a movie I did not expect to have as much fun with as I did and the reasons for this are 2:
- The first is the action violence in this film is great, there’s plenty of blood and slicing and blood and swords going through heads and kicks to the balls and I loved all of it as so many action films these days chicken out on their violence and don’t go as far they should and I’ve missed it, I’ve missed the blood flowing for the blood is the life, I’ve missed the harder edge where it feels like these fights hurt and drain the energy out of you now so many of them feel like directors playing with overgrown action figures made of plastic and it is very refreshing to see.
- Secondly Joey King makes for a very likeable heroine and her quest in this movie reminded me a lot of Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard which this movie is clearly inspired by, she’s tough and resourceful but she isn’t invincible either on numerous fronts we see her trying to outsmart her enemies as opposed to fighting them head on and after numerous times of seeing heroines essentially be able to do everything and anything right away and barely get hurt this is again a welcome change to see.
Also Olga Kurylenko is a lot of fun as one of the films villains and I loved her whip weapon, that thing was very cool to see in action.
But alas there are 2 big problems with this movie:
- Firstly the action editing here is simply atrocious, too often the action scenes are subjected to this fast forward type of editing and it totally takes you out of the fighting on screen because it feels like the filmmakers got nervous about the level of violence and felt they had to tone it down by cutting the fights so quickly in the editing room that you wouldn’t notice as much but it looks so bad and it’s a real shame.
- Secondly Dominic Cooper is really bad as the lead villain here, he just doesn’t generate the same level of pompous dickishness that Alan Rickman did so memorably in both Die Hard and Robin Hood Prince of Thieves and that is who this character desperately needed as Cooper is dull as all hell in this role and the entire time I was watching him I kept thinking “I wish an Alan Rickman type was playing this role” and someone like James McAvoy who played a memorable villain in Split a few years ago would’ve been much better in this role or his old X-Men sparring partner Michael Fassbender.
And so that was the Princess and despite some missteps this is a fun watch that surprised me by how much fun I had with it, 3 out of 5.
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